Magnetoencephalogram Blind Source Separation and Component Selection Procedure to Improve the Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease Patients

The aim of this study was to improve the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients applying a blind source separation (BSS) and component selection procedure to their magnetoencephalogram (MEG) recordings. MEGs from 18 AD patients and 18 control subjects were decomposed with the algorithm for multiple unknown signals extraction. MEG channels and components were characterized by their mean frequency, spectral entropy, approximate entropy, and Lempel-Ziv complexity. Using Student's t-test, the components which accounted for the most significant differences between groups were selected. Then, these relevant components were used to partially reconstruct the MEG channels. By means of a linear discriminant analysis, we found that the BSS-preprocessed MEGs classified the subjects with an accuracy of 80.6%, whereas 72.2% accuracy was obtained without the BSS and component selection procedure.