EEG-based classification of Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia: a comprehensive analysis of discriminative features

Abstract

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) are two main types of dementia. These diseases have similar symptoms, and they both may be considered as AD. Early detection of dementia and differential diagnosis between AD and FTD can lead to more effective management of the disease and contributes to the advancement of knowledge and potential treatments. In this approach, several features were extracted from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals of 36 subjects diagnosed with AD, 23 FTD subjects, and 29 healthy controls (HC). Mann–Whitney U-test and t-test methods were employed for the selection of the best discriminative features. The Fp1 channel for FTD patients exhibited the most significant differences compared to AD. In addition, connectivity features in the delta and alpha subbands indicated promising discrimination among these two groups. Moreover, for dementia diagnosis (AD + FTD vs. HC), central brain regions including Cz and Pz channels proved to be determining for the extracted features. Finally, four machine learning (ML) algorithms were utilized for the classification purpose. For differentiating between AD and FTD, and dementia diagnosis, an accuracy of 87.8% and 93.5% were achieved respectively, using the tenfold cross-validation technique and employing support vector machines (SVM) as the classifier.