EffNetViTLoRA: An Efficient Hybrid Deep Learning Approach for Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of the most prevalent neurodegenerative disorders worldwide. As it progresses, it leads to the deterioration of cognitive functions. Since AD is irreversible, early diagnosis is crucial for managing its progression. Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) represents an intermediate stage between Cognitively Normal (CN) individuals and those with AD, and is considered a transitional phase from normal cognition to Alzheimer's disease. Diagnosing MCI is particularly challenging due to the subtle differences between adjacent diagnostic categories. In this study, we propose EffNetViTLoRA, a generalized end-to-end model for AD diagnosis using the whole Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) dataset. Our model integrates a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with a Vision Transformer (ViT) to capture both local and global features from MRI images. Unlike previous studies that rely on limited subsets of data, our approach is trained on the full T1-weighted MRI dataset from ADNI, resulting in a more robust and unbiased model. This comprehensive methodology enhances the model's clinical reliability. Furthermore, fine-tuning large pretrained models often yields suboptimal results when source and target dataset domains differ. To address this, we incorporate Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to effectively adapt the pretrained ViT model to our target domain. This method enables efficient knowledge transfer and reduces the risk of overfitting. Our model achieves a classification accuracy of 92.52% and an F1-score of 92.76% across three diagnostic categories: AD, MCI, and CN for full ADNI dataset.