DeepCurvMRI: Deep Convolutional Curvelet Transform-Based MRI Approach for Early Detection of Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia. It usually manifests through progressive loss of cognitive function and memory, subsequently impairing the person's ability to live without assistance and causing a tremendous impact on the affected individuals and society. Currently, AD diagnosis relies on cognitive tests, blood tests, behavior assessments, brain imaging, and medical history analysis. However, these procedures are subjective and inconsistent, making an accurate prediction for the early stages of AD difficult. This paper introduces a curvelet transform (CT) based-convolutional neural network (CNN) (DeepCurvMRI) model for improving the accuracy of early-stage AD disease detection using from Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images. The MRI images were first pre-processed using CT, and then a CNN model was trained using the new image representation. In this study, we used Alzheimer's MRI images dataset hosted on the Kaggle platform to train DeepCurvMRI for multi and binary classification tasks. DeepCurvMRI achieved an accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and F1 score of 98.62% +/- 0.10%, 99.05% +/- 0.10%, 98.50% +/- 0.03%, and 99.21 +/- 0.08, respectively, using the leave-one-group-out (LOGO) cross-validation approach in multi-classification task. The highest accuracy obtained in binary classification is 98.71% +/- 0.05%. In addition to LOGO, DeepCurvMRI was tested using randomly stratified 10-fold and 5-fold cross validation. These encouraging results are superior to the ones reported in related methods, showcasing the potentiality of DeepCurvMRI in capturing the key anatomical changes in MRI images that can be differentiated between various staged of Alzheimer's disease classes.