Alcoholism changes the structure of brain. Several somatic marker hypothesis network-related regions are known to be damaged in chronic alcoholism. Neuroimaging approach can help us better understanding the impairment discovered in alcohol-dependent subjects. In this research, we recruited subjects from participating hospitals. In total, 188 abstinent long-term chronic alcoholic participants (95 men and 93 women) and 191 non-alcoholic control participants (95 men and 96 women) were enrolled in our experiment via computerized diagnostic interview schedule version IV and medical history interview employed to determine whether the applicants can be enrolled or excluded. The Siemens Verio Tim 3.0 T MR scanner (Siemens Medical Solutions, Erlangen, Germany) was employed to scan the subjects. Then, we proposed a 10-layer convolutional neural network for the diagnosis based on imaging, including three advanced techniques: parametric rectified linear unit (PReLU); batch normalization; and dropout. The structure of network is fine-tuned. The results show that our method secured a sensitivity of 97.73 ± 1.04%, a specificity of 97.69 ± 0.87%, and an accuracy of 97.71 ± 0.68%. We observed the PReLU gives better performance than ordinary ReLU, clipped ReLU, and leaky ReLU. The batch normalization and dropout gained enhanced performance as batch normalization overcame the internal covariate shift and dropout got over the overfitting. The results of our proposed 10-layer CNN model show its performance better than seven state-of-the-art approaches. © 2018, Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature.