Metaheuristic-enhanced Deep Learning Model for Accurate Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis from MRI Imaging

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is the neuro-degenerative dementia, where the precise and early recognition of AD is vital for timely treatment to reduce mortality rate. A new automated model is implemented in this work for early discovery of AD in the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) brain scans. Initially, the input brain scans are taken from the Alzheimer's disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database. Further, the acquired raw brain scans are visually improved by employing the binary normalization technique. The denoised brain scans are fed to the pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) named GoogleNet for feature extraction. Next, the extracted richer feature values are fed to the Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network for classifying the brain scan as Normal Control (NC), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and AD. In this manuscript, a Honey Badger Optimization Algorithm (HBOA) technique is incorporated with the LSTM networks for hyper-parameters optimization, where this procedure helps in diminishing the LSTM network’s complexity and computational time. The experimental results conducted on the ADNI database underscore the HBOA-based LSTM network's effectiveness, showcasing a remarkable mean classification accuracy of 97.83% in multi-class classification. Moreover, the sensitivity of HBOA based LSTM for AD/NC is 96.73% which is high when compared to the existing methodologies such as SVM with radial basis kernel function and NCSINs. This performance surpasses that of other comparative models for AD detection, emphasizing the superior capabilities and potential of the proposed method in the early detection.