Deep Learning-based Pipeline to Recognize Alzheimer's Disease using fMRI Data

Over the past decade, machine learning techniques and in particular predictive modeling and pattern recognition in biomedical sciences, from drug delivery systems to medical imaging, have become one of the most important methods of assisting researchers in gaining a deeper understanding of issues in their entirety and solving complex medical problems. Deep learning is a powerful machine learning algorithm in classification that extracts low-to high-level features. In this paper, we employ a convolutional neural network to distinguish an Alzheimers brain from a normal, healthy brain. The importance of classifying this type of medical data lies in its potential to develop a predictive model or system in order to recognize the symptoms of Alzheimers disease when compared with normal subjects and to estimate the stages of the disease. Classification of clinical data for medical conditions such as Alzheimers disease has always been challenging, and the most problematic aspect has always been selecting the strongest discriminative features. Using the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and the famous architecture LeNet-5, we successfully classified functional MRI data of Alzheimers subjects from normal controls, where the accuracy of testing data reached 96.85%. This experiment suggests that the shift and scale invariant features extracted by CNN followed by deep learning classification represents the most powerful method of distinguishing clinical data from healthy data in fMRI. This approach also allows for expansion of the methodology to predict more complicated systems.