Self-Supervised Attentive Feature Learning for Alzheimer’s Disease Detection

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that leads to memory loss and a decline in cognitive abilities. It primarily affects older adults and is the most common cause of dementia. Using deep learning, models can analyze brain imaging scans to detect specific patterns and biomarkers associated with the disease. Supervised learning models achieve high accuracy rates, but they require a large amount of data sets and labelled medical images. Self-supervised learning can achieve high accuracy rates with fewer training data. This study proposes a self-supervised attentive feature learning network (SSA-Net) for classifying Alzheimer’s disease. The proposed approach leverages self-supervised learning and attention mechanisms to enhance the accuracy and reliability of the classifying model. We employ ResNet-50, incorporating attentive activation, which replaces the ReLU activation, improving the ability of the neural model to focus on the most relevant features in the input medical images. We use SimCLR (Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations) with the ResNet-50 backbone as a self-supervised learning framework that effectively learns high-quality visual representations in brain MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scans without labelling. We used the Kaggle Alzheimer’s classification dataset (KACD) containing brain MRI scans for training and testing. Experimental results on the KACD dataset show that the proposed attentive self-supervised ResNet50 reached 99.7% classification accuracy compared to the traditional ResNet50 with 98.1% accuracy. Evaluation metrics show the effectiveness of the proposed SSA-Net for the efficient classification of Alzheimer’s disease.