Authors:
Shohei Kato
1
;
Hidetoshi Endo
2
and
Yuta Suzuki
1
Affiliations:
1
Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan
;
2
National Center for Geriatics and Gerontology, Japan
Keyword(s):
Early detection of dementia, Functional near infrared spectroscopy, fNIRS, Bayesian classifier.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Applications and Services
;
Biomedical Engineering
;
Biomedical Signal Processing
;
Computer Vision, Visualization and Computer Graphics
;
Medical Image Detection, Acquisition, Analysis and Processing
Abstract:
This paper presents a new trial approach to early detection of dementia in the elderly with the use of functional
brain imaging during cognitive tests. We have developed a non-invasive screening system of the elderly with
cognitive impairment. In addition of our previous research of speech-prosody based data-mining approach, we
had started the measurement of functional brain imaging for patient having a cognitive test by using functional
near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). We had collected 42 CHs fNIRS signals on frontal and right and left
temporal areas from 50 elderly participants (18 males and 32 females between ages of 64 to 92) during cognitive
tests in a specialized medical institute. We propose a Bayesian classifier, which can discriminate among
elderly individuals with three clinical groups: normal cognitive abilities (NL), patients with mild cognitive
impairment (MCI), and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The Bayesian classifier has two phases on the assumption
of screening process
, that firstly checks whether a suspicion of the cognitive impairment (CI) or not (NL) from
given fNIRS signals; if any, and then secondly judges the degree of the impairment: MCI or AD. This paper
also reports the examination of the detection performance by cross-validation, and discusses the effectiveness
of this study for early detection of cognitive impairment in elderly subjects. Consequently, empirical results
that both the accuracy rate of AD and the predictive value of NL are equal to or more than 90%. This suggests
that proposed approach is adequate practical to screen the elderly with cognitive impairment.
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