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An extended-2D CNN for multiclass Alzheimer's Disease diagnosis through structural MRI

Current techniques trying to predict Alzheimer's disease at an early-stage explore the structural information of T1-weighted MR Images. Among these techniques, deep convolutional neural network (CNN) is the most promising since it has been successfully used in a variety of medical imaging problems. However, the majority of works on Alzheimer's Disease tackle the binary classification problem only, i.e., to distinguish Normal Controls from Alzheimer's Disease patients. Only a few works deal with the multiclass problem, namely, patient classification into one of the three groups: Normal Control (NC), Alzheimer's Disease (AD) or Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). In this paper, our primary goal is to tackle the 3-class AD classification problem using T1-weighted MRI and a 2D CNN approach. We used the first two layers of ResNet34 as feature extractor and then trained a classifier using 64 × 64 sized patches from coronal 2D MRI slices. Our extended-2D CNN proposal explores the MRI volumetric information, by using non-consecutive 2D slices as input channels of the CNN, while maintaining the low computational costs associated with a 2D approach. The proposed model, trained and tested on images from ADNI dataset, achieved an accuracy of 68.6% for the multiclass problem, presenting the best performance when compared to state-of-the-art AD classification methods, even the 3D-CNN based ones.