A modified residual network for detection and classification of Alzheimer’s disease

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a brain disease that significantly declines a person's ability to remember and behave normally. By applying several approaches to distinguish between various stages of AD, neuroimaging data has been used to extract different patterns associated with various phases of AD. However, because the brain patterns of older adults and those in different phases are similar, researchers have had difficulty classifying them. In this paper, the 50-layer residual neural network (ResNet) is modified by adding extra convolution layers to make the extracted features more diverse. Besides, the activation function (ReLU) was replaced with (Leaky ReLU) because ReLU takes the negative parts of its input, drops them to zero, and retains the positive parts. These negative inputs may contain useful feature information that could aid in the development of high-level discriminative features. Thus, Leaky ReLU was used instead of ReLU to prevent any potential loss of input information. In order to train the network from scratch without encountering the issue of overfitting, we added a dropout layer before the fully connected layer. The proposed method successfully classified the four stages of AD with an accuracy of 97.49 % and 98 % for precision, recall, and f1-score.