Event-Related Potentials and Event-Related Spectral Perturbation for Classification of Apolipoprotein E ϵ4 Allele Carriers in Alzheimer Disease Patients and Healthy Controls.

In this paper we used Event-Related Potentials and Event-Related Spectral Perturbation as features for classification of apolipoprotein E ϵ4 allele (APOE ε4) carriers in Alzheimer disease (AD) patients and healthy controls. The study participants were 37 healthy older adults and 47 AD patients, which performed an auditory oddball task using an EEG equipment with 21 channels. A leave-one-subject-out cross-validation approach was used to perform feature selection and classification with Support Vector Machine classifiers. After feature extraction and selection, we achieved a classification accuracy of 86,90% in the APOE ε4 carriers versus non-carriers comparison (regardless of diagnosis) and 85,71% in the AD patients versus healthy controls comparison (regardless of APOE ε4 status). When combining the results of all participants we reached a global accuracy of 73,81% in the four-class classification (AD patients carriers and non-carriers, healthy elderly carriers and non-carriers). We hope our work could help clinicians to make a more accurate and earlier AD diagnosis, considering the presence of the APOE ε4 allele.