2008 International Conference on BioMedical Engineering and Informatics
Performance Evaluation and Fusion of Methods for Early Detection of Alzheimer Disease
May 27-May 30
ISBN: 978-0-7695-3118-2
The number of people that develop Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is rapidly rising, while the initial diagnosis and care of AD patients typically falls on non-specialist and still taking up to 3-5 years before being referred to specialists. An urgent need thus exists to develop methods to extract accurate and robust biomarkers from low-cost and non intrusive modalities such as electroencephalograms (EEGs). Contributions of this paper are three-fold. First we review 8 promising methods for early diagnosis of AD and undertake a performance evaluation using ROC analysis. We find that fractal dimension (AUC = 0.989), zero crossing interval (AUC = 0.980) and spectrum analysis of power alpha/theta ratio (PwrAlpha,Theta)(AUC = 0.975) perform best. With all three having sensitivity and specificity higher than 94%. We plot ROC curve with 95% confidence contours because of the small size of our data set (17 AD and 24 NOLD). Second, we investigate a fusion approach to combine these methods,using a logistic regression model, into one single more accurate biomarker (AUC = 1.0). Thirdly, to help support the distribution and use of these methods for early detection and care of AD, we developed them as web-services, integrated into online tools available from the BIOPATTERN project portal (www.biopattern.org).
Index Terms:
Alzheimers Disease, dementia, early detection, electroencephalogram, biomarker
Citation:
Brahim Hamadicharef, Cuntai Guan, Emmanuel Ifeachor, Nigel Hudson, Sunil Wimalaratna, "Performance Evaluation and Fusion of Methods for Early Detection of Alzheimer Disease," bmei, vol. 1, pp.347-351, 2008 International Conference on BioMedical Engineering and Informatics, 2008