Electroencephalogram Hybrid Method for Alzheimer Early Detection

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurocognitive illness that leads to dementia and mainly affects the elderly. As the percentage of old people is strongly increasing worldwide, it is urgent to develop contributions to solve this complex problem. The early diagnosis at AD first stage known as Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) needs a better accuracy and there is not a biomarker able to detect AD without invasive tests. In this study, Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals have been used to serve as a way of finding parameters to improve AD diagnosis in first stages. For that, a hybrid method based on a Cepstral analysis of EEG Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) multiband decomposition was developed. Several Cepstral Distances (CD) were extracted to verify the lag between cepstra of conventional bands signals. The results showed that this hybrid method is a good tool for describing and distinguishing the AD EEG activity along its different stages because several statistically significant parameters variations were found between controls, MCI, moderate AD and advanced AD (the lowest p-value=0.003<0.05).