Deep Learning in Smart Healthcare: A GAN-based Approach for Imbalanced Alzheimer's Disease Classification

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a type of dementia that leads to memory loss and impairment, which afects patients’ lives badly. It is not curable yet, but its progression can be slowed down if detected at earlier stages. In this research study, we propose a transfer learning-based convolutional neural network (CNN) model to classify magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) into one of four stages of Alzheimer's disease. One of the major limitations of the deep learning-based classification model is the non-availability of healthcare datasets related to AD. The widely used Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset has a major class imbalance issue. We propose a generative adversarial network (GAN) based data augmentation technique to overcome the data imbalance. This promotes the investigation of applying GANs to generate synthetic samples for minority classes in Alzheimer's disease datasets to enhance classification performance. The results show the progression in the overall classification process of AD.