A Dual-Attention Aware Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Early Alzheimer's Detection

Alzheimer's disease (AD) represents the primary form of neurodegeneration, impacting millions of individuals each year and causing progressive cognitive decline. Accurately diagnosing and classifying AD using neuroimaging data presents ongoing challenges in medicine, necessitating advanced interventions that will enhance treatment measures. In this research, we introduce a dual attention enhanced deep learning (DL) framework for classifying AD from neuroimaging data. Combined spatial and self-attention mechanisms play a vital role in emphasizing focus on neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques from the MRI images, which are difficult to discern with regular imaging techniques. Results demonstrate that our model yielded remarkable performance in comparison to existing state of the art (SOTA) convolutional neural networks (CNNs), with an accuracy of 99.1%. Moreover, it recorded remarkable metrics, with an F1-Score of 99.31%, a precision of 99.24%, and a recall of 99.5%. These results highlight the promise of cutting edge DL methods in medical diagnostics, contributing to highly reliable and more efficient healthcare solutions.