Performance Enhancement of Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis Using Generative Adversarial Network

Abstract

Insufficient medical images have always been a challenge for deep learning-based Alzheimer's disease classification and detection tasks. The availability of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data is limited due to patients' privacy issues. Access to individual medical records is strongly protected by the law, and appropriate consent is needed to utilize them for research purposes. Besides that, publicly available databases often experience imbalanced classes, further contributing to the issue of insufficient data. Thus, the performance of deep learning models used to diagnose Alzheimer's disease is often hindered by this issue. Basic data augmentation methods such as geometrical augmentation techniques also had limited applications to medical data. Hence, this study proposes a deep learning technique of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to expand the MRI dataset and improve the classification model performance. MRI images from the Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS) database are used in this study to perform experiments and validate hypotheses. After applying GAN to expand the dataset, a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model is used to classify the data into multiple classes of Alzheimer's and the model's performance is measured. As a result, an improvement in accuracy for the classification task can be observed, indicating that the GAN is a solution for overcoming the challenge of insufficient data for Alzheimer's diagnosis.