An EEG-fNIRS Hybridization Technique in the Multi-class Classification of Alzheimer’s Disease Facilitated by Machine Learning

Abstract

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a cognitive disorder characterized by memory impairment that can be assessed at early stages based on administering clinical tests. However, the AD pathophysiological mechanism is still poorly understood due to the difficulty of distinguishing different levels of AD severity, even using a variety of brain modalities. Therefore, in this study, we present a hybrid EEG-fNIRS modalities to compensate for each other’s weaknesses with the help of Machine Learning (ML) techniques for classifying four subject groups, including healthy controls (HC) and three distinguishable groups of AD levels. A concurrent EEF-fNIRS setup was used to record the data from 41 subjects during Oddball and 1-back tasks. We employed both a traditional neural network (NN) and a CNN-LSTM hybrid model for fNIRS and EEG, respectively. The final prediction was then obtained by using majority voting of those models. Classification results indicated that the hybrid EEG-fNIRS feature set achieved a higher accuracy (71.4%) by combining their complementary properties, compared to using EEG (67.9%) or fNIRS alone (68.9%). These findings demonstrate the potential of an EEG-fNIRS hybridization technique coupled with ML-based approaches for further AD studies.