Research of the characteristics of Alzheimer’s disease using EEG

In this paper, we propose a new method for diagnosing Alzheimer´s disease (AD) on the basis of electroencephalograms (EEG). The method, which is termed ldquoPower Variance Function (PVF) methodrdquo, indicates the variance of the power at each frequency. By using the proposed method, the power of EEG at each frequency was calculated using Wavelet transform, and the corresponding variances were defined as PVF. After the PVF histogram of 42 healthy people was approximated as a Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution, we evaluated the PVF of 10 patients with AD and 10 patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). As a result, the values for all AD and MCI subjects were abnormal. In particular, the PVF in the thetas band for MCI patients was abnormally high, and the PVF in the alpha band for AD patients was low.