DeepCGAN: early Alzheimer's detection with deep convolutional generative adversarial networks

Abstract

Introduction: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder and the most prevailing cause of dementia. AD critically disturbs the daily routine, which usually needs to be detected at its early stage. Unfortunately, AD detection using magnetic resonance imaging is challenging because of the subtle physiological variations between normal and AD patients visible on magnetic resonance imaging. Methods: To cope with this challenge, we propose a deep convolutional generative adversarial network (DeepCGAN) for detecting early-stage AD in this article. The DeepCGAN is an unsupervised generative model that expands the dataset size in addition to its diversity by utilizing the generative adversarial network (GAN). The Generator of GAN follows the encoder-decoder framework and takes cognitive data as inputs, whereas the Discriminator follows a structure similar to the Generator's encoder. The last dense layer uses a softmax classifier to detect the labels indicating the AD. Results: The proposed model attains an accuracy rate of 97.32%, significantly surpassing recent state-of-the-art models' performance, including Adaptive Voting, ResNet, AlexNet, GoogleNet, Deep Neural Networks, and Support Vector Machines. Discussion: The DeepCGAN significantly improves early AD detection accuracy and robustness by enhancing the dataset diversity and leveraging advanced GAN techniques, leading to better generalization and higher performance in comparison to traditional and contemporary methods. These results demonstrate the ecacy of DeepCGAN in enhancing early AD detection, thereby potentially improving patient outcomes through timely intervention.