A Transfer Learning Approach: Early Prediction of Alzheimer’s Disease on US Healthy Aging Dataset

Abstract

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a growing public health crisis, a very global health concern, and an irreversible progressive neurodegenerative disorder of the brain for which there is still no cure. Globally, it accounts for 60–80% of dementia cases, thereby raising the need for an accurate and effective early classification. The proposed work used a healthy aging dataset from the USA and focused on three transfer learning approaches: VGG16, VGG19, and Alex Net. This work leveraged how the convolutional model and pooling layers work to improve and reduce overfitting, despite challenges in training the numerical dataset. VGG was preferably chosen as a hidden layer as it has a more diverse, deeper, and simpler architecture with better performance when dealing with larger datasets. It consumes less memory and training time. A comparative analysis was performed using machine learning and neural network algorithm techniques. Performance metrics such as accuracy, error rate, precision, recall, F1 score, sensitivity, specificity, kappa statistics, ROC, and RMSE were experimented with and compared. The accuracy was 100% for VGG16 and VGG19 and 98.20% for Alex Net. The precision was 99.9% for VGG16, 96.6% for VGG19, and 100% for Alex Net; the recall values were 99.9% for all three cases of VGG16, VGG19, and Alex Net; and the sensitivity metric was 96.8% for VGG16, 97.9% for VGG19, and 98.7% for Alex Net, which has outperformed when compared with the existing approaches for the classification of Alzheimer’s disease. This research contributes to the advancement of predictive knowledge, leading to future empirical evaluation, experimentation, and testing in the biomedical field.