Enhanced ROI guided deep learning model for Alzheimer’s detection using 3D MRI images

Alzheimer’s disease is an incurable condition that predominantly affects the human brain, leading to the shrinkage of various brain regions and the disruption of neuronal connections. Current state-of-the-art methods for detecting Alzheimer’s disease using 3D MRI images are resource-intensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a Regions of Interest (ROI)-guided detection paradigm to address these challenges. We employ a 3D ResNet integrated with a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), demonstrating that emphasising ROIs in brain imaging can substantially reduce both computational expenditure and training time. Our model exhibits robust performance in discriminating Alzheimer’s disease from mild cognitive impairment, achieving an accuracy of 88% across the entire brain and 92% within targeted ROIs on the ADNI dataset. The accuracy on the OASIS dataset is even higher, reaching 98% for all regions and 98.33% for the ROIs. When distinguishing Alzheimer’s disease from cognitively normal individuals, the accuracy improves further, achieving 93.33% for the ROIs on the ADNI dataset and 97.8% on the OASIS dataset. In differentiating cognitively normal individuals from those with mild cognitive impairment, the model attains an accuracy of 88.2% for the ROIs on the ADNI dataset and 98.6% on the OASIS dataset. These findings highlight a notable enhancement in detection accuracy through the utilisation of fewer, yet more salient brain regions, underscoring the efficacy of our ROI-guided approach.