Electroencephalogram (EEG) microstates provide powerful tools for identifying EEG features due to their rich temporal information. In this study, we tested whether microstates can measure the severity of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) in patients and effectively distinguish AD from MCI. We defined two features using transition probabilities (TPs), and one was used to evaluate between-group differences in microstate parameters to assess the within-group consistency of TPs and MMSE scores. Another feature was used to distinguish AD from MCI in machine learning models. Tests showed that there were between-group differences in the temporal characteristics of microstates, and some kinds of TPs were significantly correlated with MMSE scores within groups. Based on our newly defined time-factor transition probabilities (TTPs) feature and partial accumulation strategy, we obtained promising scores for accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of 0.938, 0.923, and 0.947, respectively. These results provide evidence for microstates as a neurobiological marker of AD.
Keywords: AD; EEG microstates; MCI; Time-factor transition probabilities; Transition probabilities.
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.