A deeply supervised adaptable neural network for diagnosis and classification of Alzheimer's severity using multitask feature extraction

PLoS One. 2024 Mar 26;19(3):e0297996. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0297996. eCollection 2024.

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease is the most prevalent form of dementia, which is a gradual condition that begins with mild memory loss and progresses to difficulties communicating and responding to the environment. Recent advancements in neuroimaging techniques have resulted in large-scale multimodal neuroimaging data, leading to an increased interest in using deep learning for the early diagnosis and automated classification of Alzheimer's disease. This study uses machine learning (ML) methods to determine the severity level of Alzheimer's disease using MRI images, where the dataset consists of four levels of severity. A hybrid of 12 feature extraction methods is used to diagnose Alzheimer's disease severity, and six traditional machine learning methods are applied, including decision tree, K-nearest neighbor, linear discrimination analysis, Naïve Bayes, support vector machine, and ensemble learning methods. During training, optimization is performed to obtain the best solution for each classifier. Additionally, a CNN model is trained using a machine learning system algorithm to identify specific patterns. The accuracy of the Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machines, K-nearest neighbor, Linear discrimination classifier, Decision tree, Ensembled learning, and presented CNN architecture are 67.5%, 72.3%, 74.5%, 65.6%, 62.4%, 73.8% and, 95.3%, respectively. Based on the results, the presented CNN approach outperforms other traditional machine learning methods to find Alzheimer severity.

MeSH terms

  • Alzheimer Disease* / diagnosis
  • Bayes Theorem
  • Cognitive Dysfunction* / diagnosis
  • Humans
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging / methods
  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • Support Vector Machine

Grants and funding

This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (NRF-2021R1A6A1A13044830) and ICT Creative Consilience program funded by Ministry of Science and ICT (IITP-2023-2020-0-01819), Korea, supervised by the IITP (Institute for Information & communications Technology Planning & Evaluation).