Abstract
Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a degenerative neurological disorder at the early stage of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). This work is a pilot study aimed at developing a simple scalp-EEG-based method for screening and monitoring MCI and AD. Specifically, the use of graphical analysis of inter-channel coherence of resting EEG for the detection of MCI and AD at early stages is explored. Resting EEG records from 48 age-matched subjects (mean age 75.7 years)—15 normal controls (NC), 16 with early-stage MCI, and 17 with early-stage AD—are examined. Network graphs are constructed using pairwise inter-channel coherence measures for delta–theta, alpha, beta, and gamma band frequencies. Network features are computed and used in a support vector machine model to discriminate among the three groups. Leave-one-out cross-validation discrimination accuracies of 93.6% for MCI vs. NC (p < 0.0003), 93.8% for AD vs. NC (p < 0.0003), and 97.0% for MCI vs. AD (p < 0.0003) are achieved. These results suggest the potential for graphical analysis of resting EEG inter-channel coherence as an efficacious method for noninvasive screening for MCI and early AD.
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Acknowledgments
We thank A. Lawson, J. Howe, E. Walsh, J. Lianekhammy, S. Kaiser, C. Black, K. Tran, and L. Broster at UK for their assistance in data acquisition and database management. Research was sponsored in part by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the US Department of Energy, and in part by the NSF under grant number CMMI-0845753; DOE OR-22725 to NM, NIH AG000986 to YJ, NCRRUL1RR033173 to UK CTS, P30AG028383 to UK Sanders-Brown Center on Aging.
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Associate Editor Ioannis A. Kakadiaris oversaw the review of this article.
Nancy Munro is retired.
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McBride, J., Zhao, X., Munro, N. et al. Resting EEG Discrimination of Early Stage Alzheimer’s Disease from Normal Aging Using Inter-Channel Coherence Network Graphs. Ann Biomed Eng 41, 1233–1242 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-013-0788-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-013-0788-4