Anomaly-based Alzheimer’s disease detection using entropy-based probability Positron Emission Tomography images

Abstract

Deep neural networks trained on labeled medical data face major challenges owing to the economic costs of data acquisition through expensive medical imaging devices, expert labor for data annotation, and large datasets to achieve optimal model performance. The heterogeneity of diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, further complicates deep learning because the test cases may substantially differ from the training data, possibly increasing the rate of false positives. We propose a reconstruction-based self-supervised anomaly detection model to overcome these challenges. It has a dual-subnetwork encoder that enhances feature encoding augmented by skip connections to the decoder for improving the gradient flow. The novel encoder captures local and global features to improve image reconstruction. In addition, we introduce an entropy-based image conversion method. Extensive evaluations show that the proposed model outperforms benchmark models in anomaly detection and classification using an encoder. The supervised and unsupervised models show improved performances when trained with data preprocessed using the proposed image conversion method.

Keywords

• alzheimer’s disease
• anomaly detection
• deep learning
• entropy analysis
• pet imaging