In recent years, many papers have reported state-of-the-art performance on Alzheimer's Disease classification with MRI scans from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset using convolutional neural networks. However, we discover that when we split that data into training and testing sets at the subject level, we are not able to obtain similar performance, bringing the validity of many of the previous studies into question. Furthermore, we point out that previous works use different subsets of the ADNI data, making comparison across similar works tricky. In this study, we present the results of three splitting methods, discuss the motivations behind their validity, and report our results using all of the available subjects.
@cite_1: Computer-aided early diagnosis of Alzheimers Disease (AD) and its prodromal form, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), has been the subject of extensive research in recent years. Some recent studies have shown promising results in the AD and MCI determination using structural and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (sMRI, fMRI), Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) modalities. Furthermore, fusion of imaging modalities in a supervised machine learning framework has shown promising direction of research. In this paper we first review major trends in automatic classification methods such as feature extraction based methods as well as deep learning approaches in medical image analysis applied to the field of Alzheimer's Disease diagnostics. Then we propose our own algorithm for Alzheimer's Disease diagnostics based on a convolutional neural network and sMRI and DTI modalities fusion on hippocampal ROI using data from the Alzheimers Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database (this http URL). Comparison with a single modality approach shows promising results. We also propose our own method of data augmentation for balancing classes of different size and analyze the impact of the ROI size on the classification results as well.
@cite_1 extracted regions of interest around the lobes of the hippocampus using atlas Automated Anatomical Labeling (AAL), augmented their data by applying random shifts of their data by up to two pixels and random Gaussian blur with @math up to 1.2, and classified using a Siamese network on each of the regions of interest.