A Data Augmentation-Based Framework to Handle Class Imbalance Problem for Alzheimer's Stage Detection

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia. It gradually increases from mild stage to severe, affecting the ability to perform common daily tasks without assistance. It is a neurodegenerative illness, presently having no specified cure. Computer-Aided Diagnostic Systems have played an important role to help physicians to identify AD. However, the diagnosis of AD into its four stages; No Dementia, Very Mild Dementia, Mild Dementia, and Moderate Dementia remains an open research area. Deep learning assisted computer-aided solutions are proved to be more useful because of their high accuracy. However, the most common problem with deep learning architecture is that large training data is required. Furthermore, the samples should be evenly distributed among the classes to avoid the class imbalance problem. The publicly available dataset (OASIS) has serious class imbalance problem. In this research, we employed a transfer learning-based technique using data augmentation for 3D Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) views from OASIS dataset. The accuracy of the proposed model utilizing a single view of the brain MRI is 98.41% while using 3D-views is 95.11%. The proposed system outperformed the existing techniques for Alzheimer disease stages.