A new weakly supervised deep neural network for recognizing Alzheimer’s disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a chronic neurodegenerative disease that mainly affects older adults, causing memory loss and decline in thinking skills. In recent years, many traditional machine learning and deep learning methods have been used to assist in the diagnosis of AD, and most existing methods focus on early prediction of disease on a supervised basis. In reality, there is a massive amount of medical data available. However, some of those data have problems with the low-quality or lack of labels, and the cost of labeling them will be too high. To solve above problem, a new Weakly Supervised Deep Learning model (WSDL) is proposed, which adds attention mechanisms and consistency regularization to the EfficientNet framework and uses data augmentation techniques on the original data that can take full advantage of this unlabeled data. Validation of the proposed WSDL method on the brain MRI datasets of the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Program by setting five different unlabeled ratios to complete weakly supervised training showed better performance according to the compared experimental results with others baselines.