A gender-neutral approach to detect early Alzheimer's disease applying a three-layer NN

Abstract

Early diagnosis of the neurodegenerative, irreversible disease Alzheimer is crucial for effective disease management. Dementia from Alzheimer is an agglomerated result of complex criteria taking roots at both medical, social, educational backgrounds. There being multiple predictive features for the mental state of a subject, machine learning methodologies are ideal for classification due to their extremely powerful featurelearning capabilities. This study primarily attempts to classify subjects as having or not having the early symptoms of the disease and on the sidelines, endeavors to detect if a subject has already transformed towards Alzheimer's. The research utilizes the OASIS (Open Access Series of Imaging Studies) longitudinal dataset which has a uniform distribution of demented, nondemented subjects and establishes the use of novel features such as socio-economic status and educational background for early detection of dementia, proven by performing exploratory data analysis. This research exploits three data-engineered versions of the OASIS dataset with one eliminating the incomplete cases, another one with synthetically imputed data and lastly, one that eliminates gender as a feature-eventually producing the best results and making the model a gender-neutral unique piece. The neural network applied is of three layers with two ReLU hidden layers and a third softmax classification layer. The best accuracy of 86.49% obtained on cross-validation set upon trained parameters is greater than traditional learning algorithms applied previously on the same data. Drilling down to two classes namely demented and non-demented, 100% accuracy has been remarkably achieved. Additionally, perfect recall and a precision of 0.8696 for the 'demented' class have been achieved. The significance of this work consists in endorsing educational, socio-economic factors as useful features and eliminating the gender-bias using a simple neural network model without the need for complete MRI tuples that can be compensated for using specialized imputation methods.