AI-based tool for early detection of Alzheimer's disease.

In the context of Alzheimer's disease (AD), timely identification is paramount for effective management, acknowledging its chronic and irreversible nature, where medications can only impede its progression. Our study introduces a holistic solution, leveraging the hippocampus and the VGG16 model with transfer learning for early AD detection. The hippocampus, a pivotal early affected region linked to memory, plays a central role in classifying patients into three categories: cognitively normal (CN), representing individuals without cognitive impairment; mild cognitive impairment (MCI), indicative of a subtle decline in cognitive abilities; and AD, denoting Alzheimer's disease. Employing the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset, our model undergoes training enriched by advanced image preprocessing techniques, achieving outstanding accuracy (testing 98.17 %, validation 97.52 %, training 99.62 %). The strategic use of transfer learning fortifies our competitive edge, incorporating the hippocampus approach and, notably, a progressive data augmentation technique. This innovative augmentation strategy gradually introduces augmentation factors during training, significantly elevating accuracy and enhancing the model's generalization ability. The study emphasizes practical application with a user-friendly website, empowering radiologists to predict class probabilities, track disease progression, and visualize patient images in both 2D and 3D formats, contributing significantly to the advancement of early AD detection.

Spatiotemporal Mammography-based Deep Learning Model for Improved Breast Cancer Risk Prediction.

Breast cancer is one of the most prevalent cancers among women. It is the second leading cause of death in cancer-related deaths. Early detection and personalized risk assessment can reduce the mortality rate and improve survival rates. Classical risk prediction models which rely on traditional risk factors produce inconsistent results among the different populations. Thus, they are not routinely used in screening programs. Deep learning was proven to improve the results of breast cancer risk prediction. CNNs can detect risk cues from screening mammograms. However, the deep learning models utilize the spatial information of each screening mammogram independently. This study aims to further improve the risk prediction models by exploiting the spatiotemporal information in multiple screening time points. We implemented a Siamese neural network for spatiotemporal risk prediction and compared the results against CNN trained using two different time points (T1 and T2) independently. We tested our results on 191 cases, 61 of which were diagnosed with cancer. The Siamese model showed a superior AUC of 0.81 against 0.75 and 0.77 at T1 and T2 respectively. The Siamese network also exhibited higher accuracy and F1-score with values of 0.78 and 0.61 while CNNs have the same accuracy of 0.76 with an F1-score of 0.54 at T1, and 0.59 at T2. The results suggest that spatiotemporal risk prediction can be a more reliable risk assessment tool.