Development of an explainable AI model for early classification of MCI and Alzheimer's disease using T1 MRI scans

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of the leading causes of dementia. Neuroimaging permits to identify and monitor the disease, but radiological analysis requires expert radiologists. Artificial intelligence (AI) offers high performance in automating this analysis but it is limited in interpretability. In this work, an AI algorithm is used to classify structural magnetic resonance images according to the stage of AD progression. An explainable AI algorithm is employed to highlight the brain regions most relevant to the predictions of the AI algorithm.