Techniques for early detection of Alzheimer's disease using spontaneous EEG recordings.

ABSTRACT

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a degenerative disease which causes serious cognitive decline. Studies suggest that effective treatments for AD may be aided by the detection of the disease in its early stages, prior to extensive neuronal degeneration. In this paper, we propose a set of novel techniques which could help to perform this task, and present the results of experiments conducted to evaluate these approaches. The challenge is to discriminate between spontaneous EEG recordings from two groups of subjects: one afflicted with mild cognitive impairment and eventual AD and the other an age-matched control group. The classification results obtained indicate that the proposed methods are promising additions to the existing tools for detection of AD, though further research and experimentation with larger datasets is required to verify their effectiveness.