On the design of convolutional neural networks for automatic detection of Alzheimer's disease

Early detection is a crucial goal in the study of Alzheimer's Disease (AD). In this work, we describe several techniques to boost the performance of 3D convolutional neural networks trained to detect AD using structural brain MRI scans. Specifically, we provide evidence that (1) instance normalization outperforms batch normalization, (2) early spatial downsampling negatively affects performance, (3) widening the model brings consistent gains while increasing the depth does not, and (4) incorporating age information yields moderate improvement. Together, these insights yield an increment of approximately 14% in test accuracy over existing models when distinguishing between patients with AD, mild cognitive impairment, and controls in the ADNI dataset. Similar performance is achieved on an independent dataset. We make our code and models publicly available at https://github.com/NYUMedML/CNN_design_for_AD.