A Comparative Study of Alzheimer's Disease Classification using Multiple Transfer Learning Models

Over the past decade, researchers were able to solve complex medical problems as well as acquire deeper understanding of entire issue due to the availability of machine learning techniques, particularly predictive algorithms and automatic recognition of patterns in medical imaging. In this study, a technique called transfer learning has been utilized to classify Magnetic Resonance (MR) images by a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Rather than training an entire model from scratch, transfer learning approach uses the CNN model by fine-tuning them, to classify MR images into Alzheimer's disease (AD), mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and normal control (NC). The performance of this method has been evaluated over Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging (ADNI) dataset by changing the learning rate of the model. Moreover, in this study, in order to demonstrate the transfer learning approach we utilize different pre-trained deep learning models such as GoogLeNet, VGG-16, AlexNet and ResNet-18, and compare their efficiency to classify AD. The overall classification accuracy resulted by GoogLeNet for training and testing was 99.84% and 98.25% respectively, which was exceptionally more than other models training and testing accuracies.