Dual Attention Convolutional AutoEncoder for Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disorder in Patients using Neuroimaging and MRI Features

Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative disease causing memory loss and brain protein accumulation. Early diagnosis is crucial for clinical trials and patient care. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) methods have improved diagnosis and prognosis, but doctors need to interpret images proficiently. Deep learning technology has shown potential in detecting Alzheimer’s disease, but the disease progresses slower in early phases. A new dual-attention convolutional autoencoder model is presented, offering improved detection abilities and potential for real-time use in Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis. The study utilized two datasets: the first ADNI dataset, which includes three classes (MCI, CN, and AD), and the second Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Dataset, which includes two distinct classes (AD and MCI). We analyze the effectiveness of our proposed model by evaluating key performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, F1 score, and AUC score. In addition, we utilize cross-validation and mean absolute error to validate our model while also fine-tuning the parameters. Based on experimental data, the proposed model accurately detected Alzheimer’s disease with an accuracy of 0.9902 ± 0.0139. Based on the results, the proposed model demonstrates excellent performance compared to the existing methods described in the literature. The proposed mode achieves precision, sensitivity, and specificity of 0.9882 ± 0.0587, 0.9898 ± 0.0865, 0.9912 ± 0.0872 respectively. The model achieved an AUC score of 0.9992 for MCI and 0.9919 for AD class. Furthermore, the proposed method can enhance the affordability of Alzheimer’s disease diagnostics and increase the rate of early AD detection by facilitating remote healthcare.