Dynamic Image for 3D MRI Image Alzheimer’s Disease Classification

We propose to apply a 2D CNN architecture to 3D MRI image Alzheimer’s disease classification. Training a 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) is time-consuming and computationally expensive. We make use of approximate rank pooling to transform the 3D MRI image volume into a 2D image to use as input to a 2D CNN. We show our proposed CNN model achieves $$9.5\%$$ better Alzheimer’s disease classification accuracy than the baseline 3D models. We also show that our method allows for efficient training, requiring only $$20\%$$ of the training time compared to 3D CNN models. The code is available online: https://github.com/UkyVision/alzheimer-project .