Multi-Method Analysis of Medical Records and MRI Images for Early Diagnosis of Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease Based on Deep Learning and Hybrid Methods

Abstract

Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease are caused by neurodegeneration and poor communication between neurons in the brain. So far, no effective medications have been discovered for dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Thus, early diagnosis is necessary to avoid the development of these diseases. In this study, efficient machine learning algorithms were assessed to evaluate the Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS) dataset for dementia diagnosis. Two CNN models (AlexNet and ResNet-50) and hybrid techniques between deep learning and machine learning (AlexNet+SVM and ResNet-50+SVM) were also evaluated for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. For the OASIS dataset, we balanced the dataset, replaced the missing values, and applied the t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbour Embedding algorithm (t-SNE) to represent the high-dimensional data in the low-dimensional space. All of the machine learning algorithms, namely, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree, Random Forest and K Nearest Neighbours (KNN), achieved high performance for diagnosing dementia. The random forest algorithm achieved an overall accuracy of 94% and precision, recall and F1 scores of 93%, 98% and 96%, respectively. The second dataset, the MRI image dataset, was evaluated by AlexNet and ResNet-50 models and AlexNet+SVM and ResNet-50+SVM hybrid techniques. All models achieved high performance, but the performance of the hybrid methods between deep learning and machine learning was better than that of the deep learning models. The AlexNet+SVM hybrid model achieved accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and AUC scores of 94.8%, 93%, 97.75% and 99.70%, respectively.