Hippocampus Segmentation-Based Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis and Classification of MRI Images

Alzheimer's disease represents a neurological condition characterized by steady cognitive decline and eventual memory loss due to the death of brain cells. It is one of the most prominent dementia types observed in patients and which hence underlines the imminent need for potential methods to diagnose the disease early on. This work considers a novel approach by utilizing a reduced version of one of the datasets used in this work to achieve a considerably accurate prediction while also enabling quicker training. It leverages image segmentation to isolate the hippocampus region from brain MRI images and then strikes a comparison between models trained on the segmented portions and models trained on complete images. This research uses two datasets-4 classes of images from Kaggle and a popular OASIS 2 MRI and demographic dataset. A deep learning-based approach was adopted to train the Kaggle dataset to perform severity classification, and the hippocampus region segmented from a reduced version of the OASIS dataset was trained on supervised and ensemble learning algorithms to detect Alzheimer's disease. The metric used for the assessment of model performance is classification accuracy. A comparative analysis between the proposed approach and existing work was also performed, and it was observed that the proposed approach is effective in the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.