Lightweight 3D CNN for MRI Analysis in Alzheimer’s Disease: Balancing Accuracy and Efficiency

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder characterized by subtle structural changes in the brain, which can be observed through MRI scans. Although traditional diagnostic approaches rely on clinical and neuropsychological assessments, deep learning-based methods such as 3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently been introduced to improve diagnostic accuracy. However, their high computational complexity remains a challenge. To address this, we propose a lightweight magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) classification framework that integrates adaptive multi-scale feature extraction with structural pruning and parameter optimization. The pruned model achieving a compact architecture with approximately 490k parameters (0.49 million), 4.39 billion floating-point operations, and a model size of 1.9 MB, while maintaining high classification performance across three binary tasks. The proposed framework was evaluated on the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative dataset, a widely used benchmark for AD research. Notably, the model achieves a performance density(PD) of 189.87, where PD is a custom efficiency metric defined as the classification accuracy per million parameters (% pm), which is approximately 70× higher than the basemodel, reflecting its balance between accuracy and computational efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly reduces resource consumption without compromising diagnostic performance, providing a practical foundation for real-time and resource-constrained clinical applications in Alzheimer's disease detection.