Classification of Alzheimer's Disease Patients Based on Magnetic Resonance Images and an Improved UNet++ Model

• Main Authors: ZHAO Shang-yi, WANG Yuan-jun
• Format: Article
• Language: zho
• Published: Science Press 2020-09-01
• Series: Chinese Journal of Magnetic Resonance
• Subjects: magnetic resonance imaging (mri); deep learning; feature fusion; alzheimer's disease
• Online Access: http://121.43.60.238/bpxzz/EN/10.11938/cjmr20192769
• ISSN: 1000-4556; 1000-4556

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of the most common forms of dementia and a degenerative mental disorder that seriously affects people's daily lives. Rapid and effective diagnosis is essential for the treatment of patients with Alzheimer's disease. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a deep convolutional neural network structure with multiple semantic levels to classify AD patients and healthy controls from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. Firstly, the deep supervision integration algorithm and the classification model of Alzheimer's disease based on the traditional UNet++ network were improved. Then, a new feature fusion structure was constructed, which further refined the different semantic levels. Lastly, the proposed protocol was applied to different tissue regions (e.g., white matter, gray matter and cerebrospinal fluid), and the effects of different tissue information combinations on the classification outcome were explored. The method proposed was applied to the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset to classify the AD patients. The results demonstrated that the highest accuracy of 98.74%, and an average accuracy of 98.47%.