Alzheimer’s Disease and Frontotemporal Dementia: Differential Diagnosis Using Electroencephalogram Signal

Dementia is a neurological disorder that affects a person’s cognitive and social skills, leading to a decline in their overall mental functioning. Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are two common types of dementia. Frontotemporal dementia mostly affects the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. These areas are responsible for executive functions, decision-making, language, behavior regulation, and personality traits. Alzheimer’s disease primarily damages the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as memory, language, and perception. The electroencephalogram (EEG) signal has many advantages in diagnosing these disorders, including low cost and high temporal resolution. This study compares AD and FTD patients with healthy subjects by extracting specific features from EEG signals. Two machine learning algorithms were used for the separation, Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and k-Nearest Neighbors (KNNs), and 10-Fold Cross-Validation was applied to validate the performance of this method and an accuracy of 91.2% (sd = 7.8) was achieved using the SVM classifier for diagnosing the disease and 71.1% (sd = 8.6) for classifying AD and FTD.