Classification of Alzheimer's disease in MRI images using knowledge distillation framework: an investigation.

Purpose: Computer-aided MRI analysis is helpful for early detection of Alzheimer's disease(AD). Recently, 3D convolutional neural networks(CNN) are widely used to analyse MRI images. However, 3D CNN requires huge memory cost. In this paper, we introduce cascaded CNN and long and short-term memory (LSTM) networks. We also use knowledge distillation to improve the accuracy of the model using small medical image dataset.

Methods: We propose a cascade structure, CNN-LSTM. CNN is used as the function of feature extraction, and LSTM is used as the classifier. In this way, the correlation between different slices can be considered and the calculation cost caused by 3D data can be reduced. To overcome the problem of limited image training data, transfer learning is a more reasonable way of feature extraction. We use the knowledge distillation algorithm to improve the performance of student models for AD diagnosis through a powerful teacher model to guide the work of student models.

Results: The accuracy of the proposed model is improved using knowledge distillation. The results show that the accuracy of the student models reached 85.96% after the guidance of the teacher models, an increase by 3.83%.

Conclusion: We propose cascaded CNN-LSTM to classify 3D ADNI data, and use knowledge distillation to improve the model accuracy when trained with small size dataset. It can process 3D data efficiently as well as reduce the computational cost.