Abstract
Parkinson's disease (PD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative disorders that affect the quality of human life of millions of people throughout the world. The probability of getting affected by this disease increases with age, and it is common among the elderly population. Early detection can help in initiating medications at an earlier stage. It can significantly slow down the progression of this disease, assisting the patient to maintain a good quality of life for a more extended period. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-based brain imaging is an area of active research that is used to diagnose PD disease early and to understand the key biomarkers. The prior research investigations using MRI data mainly focus on volume, structural, and morphological changes in the basal ganglia (BG) region for diagnosing PD. Recently, researchers have emphasized the significance of studying other areas of the human brain for a more comprehensive understanding of PD and also to analyze changes happening in brain tissue. Thus, to perform accurate diagnosis and treatment planning for early identification of PD, this work focuses on learning the onset of PD from images taken from whole-brain MRI using a novel 3D-convolutional neural network (3D-CNN) deep learning architecture. The conventional 3D-Resent deep learning model, after various hyper-parameter tuning and architectural changes, has achieved an accuracy of 90%. In this work, a novel 3D-CNN architecture was developed, and after several ablation studies, the model yielded results with an improved accuracy of 93.4%. Combining features from the 3D-CNN and 3D ResNet models using Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) resulted in 95% accuracy. For further enhancements of the model performance, feature fusion with optimization was employed, utilizing various optimization techniques. Whale optimization based on a biologically inspired approach was selected on the basis of a convergence diagram. The performance of this approach is compared to other methods and has given an accuracy of 97%. This work represents a critical advancement in improving PD diagnosis techniques and emphasizing the importance of deep nested 3D learning and bio-inspired feature selection.