Towards an early diagnosis of Alzheimer disease: a precise and parallel image segmentation approach via derived hybrid cross entropy thresholding method

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is an irreversible and progressive brain disease causing brain degenerative disorder and dementia. An early diagnosis of AD provides the individual an opportunity to participate in clinical trials. Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system in the health care sector has been widely used and plays an important role in detecting such diseases. However, the main challenge of such systems is through identifying the region of interest obtained through precise segmentation. This paper attempts to solve the segmentation issue by developing a precise image segmentation model. The proposed model used a derivation of a hybrid cross entropy thresholding technique for the precise extraction of infected regions. In other words, a novel segmentation methodology has been proposed using the output derivation of both Gamma and Gaussian distributions. Moreover, to tackle the performance and time-consuming problems in digital image segmentation, a parallel boosting methodology has been developed and implemented. Through using the ADNI, OASIS, and MIRIAD benchmark datasets, the experimentation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed model through achieving more than 90% accuracy with 2x times speed improvement compared to other benchmark segmentation methods.