DemNet: A Convolutional Neural Network for the detection of Alzheimer's Disease and Mild Cognitive Impairment

The early diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and its prodromal form, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), has been the subject of extensive research in recent years. Some recent studies have shown promising results in the diagnosis of AD and MCI using structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans. In this paper, we propose the use of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in the detection of AD and MCI. In particular, we modified the 16-layered VGGNet for the 3-way classification of AD, MCI and Healthy Controls (HC) on the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset achieving an overall accuracy of 91.85% and outperforming several classifiers from other studies.