Identification of Dementia Related Brain Functional Networks with Minimum Spanning Trees

Neurocognitive impairments such as mild cognitive impairment (MCI), alzheimer's disease (AD) and vascular dementia (VD) effect the functional connectivity across the brain networks that aid proper neurocognitive functioning. Identification of dementia related disorders has remained a challenge due to their overlapping underlying complex structures. In this paper, we analyze the loss of functional connections of dementia networks in comparison with the network of average healthy control (HC) subjects. We then perform the topological quantification of the minimum spanning tree (MST) networks using graph theory metrics to identify the brain functional networks of MCI, AD and VD in comparison with healthy control (HC) subjects. A common reactive band is identified and MST is formed for all the subjects. The MST topological quantifications are used to identify the dementia related disorders based on the data recorded from 10 HC subjects and 30 dementia subjects. Our results show that the proposed approach has the potential to identify the dementia stages and can enhance the diagnosis of dementia related disorders.