A method for detection of Alzheimer's disease using ICA-enhanced EEG measurements

Many researchers have studied automatic EEG classification and recently a lot of work has been done on artefact-removal from EEG data using independent component analyses (ICA). However, demonstrating that a ICA-processed multichannel EEG measurement becomes more interpretable compared to the raw data (as is usually done in work on ICA-processing of EEG data) does not yet prove that detection of (incipient) anomalies is also better possible after ICA-processing. The objective of this study is to show that ICA-preprocessing is useful when constructing a detection system for Alzheimer's disease. The paper describes a method for detection of EEG patterns indicative of Alzheimer's disease using automatic pattern recognition techniques. Our method incorporates an artefact removal stage based on ICA prior to automatic classification. The method is evaluated on measurements of a length of 8 s from two groups of patients, where one group is in an initial stage of the disease (28 patients), whereas the other group is in a more progressed stage (15 patients). Both setups include a control group that should be classified as normal (10 and 21, respectively). Our final classification results for the group with severe Alzheimer's disease are comparable to the best results from literature. We show that ICA-based reduction of artefacts improves classification results for patients in an initial stage. We conclude that a more robust detection of Alzheimer's disease related EEG patterns may be obtained by employing ICA as ICA based pre-processing of EEG data can improve classification results for patients in an initial stage of Alzheimer's disease.