Machine learning approaches in comparative studies for Alzheimer's diagnosis using 2D MRI slices

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an illness that involves a gradual and irreversible degeneration of the brain. It is crucial to establish a precise diagnosis of AD early on in order to enable prompt therapies and prevent further deterioration. Researchers are currently focusing increasing attention on investigating the potential of machine learning techniques to simplify the automated diagnosis of AD using neuroimaging. The present study involved a comparison of models for the detection of AD through the utilization of 2D image slices obtained from magnetic resonance imaging brain scans. Five models, namely ResNet, ConvNeXt, CaiT, Swin Transformer, and CVT, were implemented to learn features and classify AD based on various perspectives of 2D image slices. A series of experiments were conducted using the dataset from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. The results showed that ConvNeXt outperformed ResNet, CaiT, Swin Transformer, and CVT. ConvNeXt exhibited an average accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score of 95.74%, 96.71%, 95.74%, and 96.14%, respectively, when applied to a 3-way classification task involving AD, mild cognitive impairment, and normal control subjects. The results suggest that the utilization of ConvNeXt may have potential in the identification of AD using 2D slice images.