Alzheimer's disease detection using a Self-adaptive Resource Allocation Network classifier

This paper presents a new approach using Voxel-Based Morphometry (VBM) detected features with a Self-adaptive Resource Allocation Network (SRAN) classifier for the detection of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans. For feature reduction, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) has been performed on the morphometric features obtained from the VBM analysis and these reduced features are then used as input to the SRAN classifier. In our study, the MRI volumes of 30 ‘mild AD to moderate AD’ patients and 30 normal persons from the well-known Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS) data set have been used. The results indicate that the SRAN classifier produces a mean testing efficiency of 91.18% with only 20 PCA reduced features whereas, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) produces a mean testing efficiency of 90.57% using 45 PCA reduced features. Also, the results show that the SRAN classifier avoids over-training by minimizing the number of samples used for training and provides a better generalization performance compared to the SVM classifier. The study clearly indicates that our proposed approach of PCA-SRAN classifier performs accurate classification of AD subjects using reduced morphometric features.