ADVANCEMENTS IN ALZHEIMER’S DIAGNOSIS THROUGH MRI USING BAYESIAN CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS AND VARIATIONAL INFERENCE

Alzheimer’s disease is one of the brain disorders that can be deadly in older. The disease is less treated and less recognized, but Alzheimer’s disease is now a significant public health problem. Early detection of the disease can significantly reduce symptoms. However, the lack of medical personnel makes handling this disease complex. Therefore, an automatic diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is needed with a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) examination to get an accurate diagnosis of the disease. This study classified the type of Alzheimer’s disease with deep learning methods using the Bayesian Convolutional Neural Network (BCNN) and the Variational Inference (VI) technique. It aims to determine image classification and accuracy level at the level of Alzheimer’s disease by using 2,400 brain MRI images, divided into three classes (non-demented, very mild demented, and mild demented) based on severity. The data was acquired from the kaggle.com website. We use a dataset scenario of 80% for training and 20% for testing, 100x100 pixels, kernel size 3x3, and optimizer Adam with epoch 200. The accuracy of the image classification process is 80%. The non-demented label predicts that the uncertainty is 0.371, and the other uncertainty prediction is 0.002. The ability to anticipate uncertainty enables clinicians to make informed decisions regarding the reliability of the model’s output and the need for additional validation or confirmation.