Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a common form of dementia which mostly affects elderly people. Gradual loss in memory and declining cognitive functions are core symptoms associated with AD. Conventional brain images do not provide sufficient information to diagnose AD at an early stage. To delay the progression of memory impairment there is a dire need to develop systems capable of early AD diagnosis. This paper describes a proposed fuzzy method for inferring the risk of dementia using the brain cortical thickness and hippocampus thickness. The aim is to develop a reliable index that allows the evaluation of brain health. The dementia index poses potential to become a biologically-based biomarker for the clinical assessment of patient's dementia. Results show that the inference value of patient with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is significantly higher than that of healthy (Control) or schizophrenia (SCZ) patients. Our results suggest that a higher inference value indicates that the patient is at higher risk and is more likely to eventually progress to AD. The system was also tested with age-associated memory impairment (AAMI) patients. The results confirm that our model is able to distinguish between these four patient groups.
It is well-known that individuals' cognitive functions and memory will decay with age, an irreversible process that can result in various diseases. Among them, Alzheimer's disease (AD)is the most common mental disease which affects elderly people whose age is over 65. Though the main causes remain a mystery till nowadays, there is no doubt that this disease appears repeatedly in aged societies. Thus, there is a strong need to improve our current knowledge in order to figure out whether a patient suffers from AD or not, which is not even easy to understand. Since the literature reports that AD subjects present a thin cortical thickness, this study continues our previous one towards this direction. In this study we improved the previous fuzzy c-means clustering which is used to find centroids from persistence diagrams, this one coming from the cortical thickness.As last step we defined a new fuzzy model to estimate whether a subject is affected by dementia or not, based on cortical thickness.New and more experiments conducted on normal, schizophrenia and AD patients gather that our system is reliable and indeed can help to find the Alzheimer's disease in patients.
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