Classification of healthy, mild cognitive impairment and alzheimer's disease electroencephalography signals

The term dementia refers to neurodegenerative disorder characterized by impaired cognitive and behavioral functions due to death or damage of brain cells. Alzheimer's Disease (AD), the most common form of dementia, is a progressive disorder characterized by cognitive, intellectual deficits and behavioral disorders. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI), on the other hand, refers to individuals with cognitive impairment beyond their expectations for age, but not strong enough to meet the diagnostic criteria for AD. Every year, approximately 10-15 percent of MCI patients progress to AD. Diagnosis of these diseases is made by interpreting the results of cognitive tests, physical and neurological examinations, neuroimaging methods, and blood and cerebrospinal fluid examinations. Therefore, the diagnostic process is time-consuming, has difficulties for the target patient population and can yield to subjective results. In addition, early diagnosis of dementia gives patients and their families time to plan this process. At the same time, even there is no treatment for these diseases, treatment processes initiated at an early stage may slow down the progression of the disease and alleviate the symptoms. In this thesis, we've investigated the feasibility of electroencephalography (EEG), a noninvasive, inexpensive, objective method for the diagnosis of AD and MCI. In this study, EEG signals collected from real patients were examined in accordance with the diagnosis made by specialists in Neurology Clinic of Baskent University Ankara Hospital. In this study, EEG signals were examined by using discrete wavelet transform (DWT), power spectral density (PSD), coherence, continuous wavelet transform (CWT) methods. As a result of the investigations, different features were extracted for each different method. In the analysis made by DWT, the signals are decomposed into 6 sub bands (delta (0-4 Hz), theta (4-8 Hz), alpha (8-12 Hz), beta1 (12-16 Hz), beta2 (16-32 Hz), gamma (32-48 Hz)). Mean, maximum-minimum values, variance and standard deviation of the 6 sub bands were determined as a feature set. Moreover, the amplitude sum and variance of the PSD of the sub bands obtained were determined as frequency features. In addition, the normalized sub band coherences, obtained as a result of the coherence analysis between the interhemispheric channel pairs, were extracted as a feature set. Finally, a different feature set was formed by using the mean, standard deviation and the ratio of the coefficients of the sub-band frequencies obtained from the CWT analysis of the signal. In order to measure the success of discrimination of AD, MCI and healthy control EEG signals, classification studies were performed with classifier algorithms such as support vector machines, k-nearest neighbor and decision trees. As a result of this study, a decision support system was developed that can diagnose successfully and can yield higher or equal results in the means of accuracy of the literature.