Brain-Aware Replacements for Supervised Contrastive Learning in Detection of Alzheimer's Disease.

We propose a novel framework for Alzheimer's disease (AD) detection using brain MRIs. The framework starts with a data augmentation method called Brain-Aware Replacements (BAR), which leverages a standard brain parcellation to replace medically-relevant 3D brain regions in an anchor MRI from a randomly picked MRI to create synthetic samples. Ground truth "hard" labels are also linearly mixed depending on the replacement ratio in order to create "soft" labels.