Exceptional performance with minimal data using a generative adversarial network for alzheimer's disease classification

The classification of Alzheimer's disease (AD) using deep learning models is hindered by the limited availability of data. Medical image datasets are scarce due to stringent regulations on patient privacy, preventing their widespread use in research. Moreover, although open-access databases such as the Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS) are available publicly for providing medical image data for research, they often suffer from imbalanced classes. Thus, to address the issue of insufficient data, this study proposes the integration of a generative adversarial network (GAN) that can achieve comparable accuracy with a reduced data requirement. GANs are unsupervised deep learning networks commonly used for data augmentation that generate high-quality synthetic data to overcome data scarcity. Experimental data from the OASIS database are used in this research to train the GAN model in generating synthetic MRI data before being included in a pretrained convolutional neural network (CNN) model for multistage AD classification. As a result, this study has demonstrated that a multistage AD classification accuracy above 80% can be achieved even with a reduced dataset. The exceptional performance of GANs positions them as a solution for overcoming the challenge of insufficient data in AD classification.