Volume 32, Issue 2 pp. 673-686
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Interpretability of deep neural networks used for the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease

Tomáš Pohl

Corresponding Author

Tomáš Pohl

Institute of Computer Engineering and Applied Informatics, Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies STU, Bratislava, Slovakia

Correspondence

Tomáš Pohl, Institute of Computer Engineering and Applied Informatics, Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies STU in Bratislava, Ilkovičova 2, 842 16 Bratislava, Slovakia.

Email: [email protected]

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Marek Jakab

Marek Jakab

Institute of Computer Engineering and Applied Informatics, Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies STU, Bratislava, Slovakia

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Wanda Benesova

Wanda Benesova

Institute of Computer Engineering and Applied Informatics, Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies STU, Bratislava, Slovakia

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First published: 28 September 2021
Citations: 1

A complete listing of ADNI investigators can be found at: http://adni.loni.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/how_to_apply/ADNI_Acknowledgement_List.pdf.

Funding information: Canadian Institutes of Health Research; Transition Therapeutics; Takeda Pharmaceutical Company; Servier; Piramal Imaging; Pfizer Inc.; Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation; NeuroRx Research; Neurotrack Technologies; Meso Scale Diagnostics, LLC.; Lumosity; Lundbeck; Merck & Co., Inc.; Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development LLC.; Janssen Alzheimer Immunotherapy Research & Development, LLC.; IXICO Ltd.; GE Healthcare; Fujirebio; Genentech, Inc.; F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd; Eli Lilly and Company; EuroImmun; Elan Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Eisai Inc.; Cogstate; CereSpir, Inc.; Bristol-Myers Squibb Company; Biogen; Araclon Biotech; BioClinica, Inc.; Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation; AbbVie, Alzheimer's Association; National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering; National Institute on Aging; Department of Defense (DOD), Grant/Award Number: W81XWH-12-2-0012; National Institutes of Health, Grant/Award Number: U01 AG024904; Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI); STU Grant scheme for Support of Young Researchers

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a chronic brain disorder and is the most common cause of dementia. Patients suffering from AD experience memory loss, confusion, and other cognitive and behavioral complications. As the disease progresses, these symptoms become severe enough to interfere with the patient's daily life. Since AD is an irreversible disease and existing treatments can only slow down its progress, early diagnosis of AD is a key moment in fighting this disease. In this article, we propose a novel approach for diagnosing AD via deep neural networks from magnetic resonance imaging images. Additionally, we propose three new propagation rules for the layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) method, which is a method used for visualizing evidence in deep neural networks to obtain a better understanding of the network's behavior. We also propose various rule configurations for the LRP to achieve better interpretability of the network. Our proposed classification method achieves a 92% accuracy when classifying AD versus healthy controls, which is comparable to state-of-the-art approaches and could potentially aid doctors in AD diagnosis and reduce the occurrence of human error. Our proposed visualization approaches also show improvements in evidence visualization, which helps the spread of computer-aided diagnosis in the medical domain by eliminating the “black-box” nature of the neural networks.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

Data used in preparation of this article were obtained from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database (adni.loni.usc.edu) and is publicly available for researchers.

The full text of this article hosted at iucr.org is unavailable due to technical difficulties.