A significant regional-based diagnosis system for early detection of Alzheimer’s disease using sMRI scans

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an irreversible neurodegenerative disorder that targets the central nervous system causing a significant degradation that affects the patient's life. The early diagnosis of the disease is highly recommended due to a number of factors that can assist in improving the quality of patients' life. The main aim of this paper is to present a personalized-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system to serve the early diagnosis of AD. This system aims to visualize the disease's effect in each of the brain regions to provide more assistance in the diagnosis and consequently the treatment procedures. To achieve better performance and precise diagnosis results, the statistical analysis has been applied to define a subset of brain regions that show significant influence by the disease. Evaluating the system's performance shows an accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity of 96%, 100%, and 93.1%, respectively. These results were validated with the related work and showed promising results in addressing the classification problem of the early diagnosis of AD.