ADVIAN: Alzheimer's Disease VGG-Inspired Attention Network Based on Convolutional Block Attention Module and Multiple Way Data Augmentation

Aim: Alzheimer's disease is a neurodegenerative disease that causes 60–70% of all cases of dementia. This study is to provide a novel method that can identify AD more accurately. Methods: We first propose a VGG-inspired network (VIN) as the backbone network and investigate the use of attention mechanisms. We proposed an Alzheimer's Disease VGG-Inspired Attention Network (ADVIAN), where we integrate convolutional block attention modules on a VIN backbone. Also, 18-way data augmentation is proposed to avoid overfitting. Ten runs of 10-fold cross-validation are carried out to report the unbiased performance. Results: The sensitivity and specificity reach 97.65 ± 1.36 and 97.86 ± 1.55, respectively. Its precision and accuracy are 97.87 ± 1.53 and 97.76 ± 1.13, respectively. The F1 score, MCC, and FMI are obtained as 97.75 ± 1.13, 95.53 ± 2.27, and 97.76 ± 1.13, respectively. The AUC is 0.9852. Conclusion: The proposed ADVIAN gives better results than 11 state-of-the-art methods. Besides, experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of 18-way data augmentation.