A novel electroencephalography based approach for Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment detection

Background and objective: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by cognitive, behavioral and intellectual deficits. The term mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is used to describe individuals whose cognitive impairment departing from their expectations for the age that does not interfere with daily activities. To diagnose these disorders, a combination of time-consuming, expensive tests that has difficulties for the target population are evaluated, moreover, the evaluation may yield subjective results. In the presented study, a novel methodology is developed for the automatic detection of AD and MCI using EEG signals. Methods: This study analyzed the EEGs of 35 subjects (16 MCI, 8 AD, 11 healthy control) with the developed algorithm. The algorithm consists of 3 methods for analysis, discrete wavelet transform(DWT), power spectral density (PSD) and coherence. In the first approach, DWT is applied to the signals to obtain major EEG sub-bands, afterward, PSD of each sub-band is calculated using Burg's method. In the second approach, interhemispheric coherence values are calculated. The variance and amplitude summation of each sub-bands' PSD and the amplitude summation of the coherence values corresponding to the major sub-bands are determined as features. Bagged Trees is selected as a classifier among the other tested classification algorithms. Data set is used to train the classifier with 5-fold cross-validation. Results: As a result, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of 96.5%, 96.21%, 97.96% are achieved respectively. Conclusion: In this study, we have investigated whether EEG can provide efficient clues about the neuropathology of Alzheimer's Disease and mild cognitive impairment for early and accurate diagnosis. Accordingly, a decision support system that produces reproducible and objective results with high accuracy is developed.