Multiscale dispersion entropy for the regional analysis of resting-state magnetoencephalogram complexity in Alzheimer's disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive and irreversible brain disorder of the nervous system affecting memory, thinking, and emotion. It is the most important cause of dementia and an influential social problem in all the world. The complexity of brain recordings has been successfully used to help to characterize AD. We have recently introduced multiscale dispersion entropy (MDE) as a very fast and powerful tool to quantify the complexity of signals. The aim of this study is to assess the ability of MDE, in comparison with multiscale permutation entropy (MPE) and multiscale entropy (MSE), to discriminate 36 AD patients from 26 elderly age-matched control subjects using resting-state magnetoencephalogram (MEG) recordings. The results showed that MDE, unlike MSE, does not lead to undefined values. Moreover, the differences between the MDE values for AD palatines versus controls were more significant than their corresponding MSE- and MPE-based values. In addition, the computation time for our recently developed MDE was considerably less than that for MSE and even MPE.