title: Analysis of neural dynamics in mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease using wavelet turbulence.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Current diagnostic guidelines encourage further research for the development of novel Alzheimer's disease (AD) biomarkers, especially in its prodromal form (i.e. mild cognitive impairment, MCI). Magnetoencephalography (MEG) can provide essential information about AD brain dynamics; however, only a few studies have addressed the characterization of MEG in incipient AD.
  
  
  METHODS
  We analyzed MEG rhythms from 36 AD patients, 18 MCI subjects and 27 controls, introducing a new wavelet-based parameter to quantify their dynamical properties: the wavelet turbulence.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Our results suggest that AD progression elicits statistically significant regional-dependent patterns of abnormalities in the neural activity (p < 0.05), including a progressive loss of irregularity, variability, symmetry and Gaussianity. Furthermore, the highest accuracies to discriminate AD and MCI subjects from controls were 79.4% and 68.9%, whereas, in the three-class setting, the accuracy reached 67.9%.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our findings provide an original description of several dynamical properties of neural activity in early AD and offer preliminary evidence that the proposed methodology is a promising tool for assessing brain changes at different stages of dementia.
authors.affiliation: Biomedical Engineering Group, Department TSCIT, ETS. Ingenieros de Telecomunicación, University of Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain. IMUVA, Instituto de Investigación en Matemáticas, University of Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain. INCYL, Instituto de Neurociencias de Castilla y León, Salamanca, Spain.
authors.forename: Jesús
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Poza
authors.forename: Carlos
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Gómez
authors.forename: María
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: García
authors.forename: Rebeca
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Corralejo
authors.forename: Alberto
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Fernández
authors.forename: Roberto
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Hornero
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology*; D060825:Cognitive Dysfunction / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D015225:Magnetoencephalography / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000503:physiopathology*; D058067:Wavelet Analysis