Affiliation:
1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Oakland University, Rochester, MI 48309, USA
2. Department of Networks and Communications Engineering, College of Computer Science and Information Systems, Najran University, Najran 61441, Saudi Arabia
3. Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia
Abstract
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is an illness affecting the neurological system in people commonly aged 65 years and older. It is one of the leading causes of dementia and, subsequently, the cause of death as it gradually affects and destroys brain cells. In recent years, the detection of AD has been examined in ways to mitigate its impacts while considering early detection through computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) tools. In this study, we developed deep learning models that focus on early detection and classifying each case, non-demented, moderate-demented, mild-demented, and very-mild-demented, accordingly through transfer learning (TL); an AlexNet, ResNet-50, GoogleNet (InceptionV3), and SqueezeNet by utilizing magnetic resonance images (MRI) and the use of image augmentation. The acquired images, a total of 12,800 images and four classifications, had to go through a pre-processing phase to be balanced and fit the criteria of each model. Each of these proposed models split the data into 80% training and 20% testing. AlexNet performed an average accuracy of 98.05%, GoogleNet (InceptionV3) performed an average accuracy of 97.80%, and ResNet-50 had an average performing accuracy of 91.11%. The transfer learning approach assists when there is not adequate data to train a network from the start, which aids in tackling one of the major challenges faced when working with deep learning.