This work addresses brain network analysis considering different clinical severity stages of cognitive dysfunction, based on resting-state electroencephalography (EEG). We use a cohort acquired in real-life clinical conditions, which contains EEG data of subjective cognitive impairment (SCI) patients, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients, and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients. We propose to exploit an epoch-based entropy measure to quantify the connectivity links in the networks. This entropy measure relies on a refined statistical modeling of EEG signals with Hidden Markov Models, which allow a better estimation of the spatiotemporal characteristics of EEG signals. We also propose to conduct a comparative study by considering three other measures largely used in the literature: phase lag index, coherence, and mutual information. We calculated such measures at different frequency bands and computed different local graph parameters considering different proportional threshold values for a binary network analysis. After applying a feature selection procedure to determine the most relevant features for classification performance with a linear Support Vector Machine algorithm, our study demonstrates the effectiveness of the statistical entropy measure for analyzing the brain network in patients with different stages of cognitive dysfunction.

This study addresses brain network analysis over different clinical severity stages of cognitive dysfunction using electroencephalography (EEG). We exploit EEG data of subjective cognitive impairment (SCI) patients, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients. We propose a new framework to study the topological networks with a spatiotemporal entropy measure for estimating the connectivity. Our results show that functional connectivity and graph analysis are frequency-band dependent, and alterations start at the MCI stage. In delta, the SCI group exhibited a decrease of clustering coefficient and an increase of path length compared to MCI and AD. In alpha, the opposite behavior appeared, suggesting a rapid and high efficiency in information transmission across the SCI network. Modularity analysis showed that electrodes of the same brain region were distributed over several modules, and some obtained modules in SCI were extended from anterior to posterior regions. These results demonstrate that the SCI network was more resilient to neuronal damage compared to that of MCI and even more compared to that of AD. Finally, we confirm that MCI is a transitional stage between SCI and AD, with a predominance of high-strength intrinsic connectivity, which may reflect the compensatory response to the neuronal damage occurring early in the disease process.

We aimed to explore the online signature modality for characterizing early-stage Alzheimer’s disease (AD). A few studies have explored this modality, whereas many on online handwriting have been published. We focused on the analysis of raw temporal functions acquired by the digitizer on signatures produced during a simulated check-filling task. Sample entropy was exploited to measure the information content in raw time sequences. We show that signatures of early-stage AD patients have lower information content than those of healthy persons, especially in the time sequences of pen pressure and pen altitude angle with respect to the tablet. The combination of entropy values on two signatures for each person was classified with two linear classifiers often used in the literature: support vector machine and linear discriminant analysis. The improvements in sensitivity and specificity were significant with respect to the a priori group probabilities in our population of AD patients and healthy subjects. We show that altitude angle, when combined with pen pressure, conveys crucial information on the wrist-hand-finger system during signature production for pathology detection.

We aim at enhancing personal identity security on mobile touch-screen sensors by augmenting handwritten signatures with specific additional information at the enrollment phase. Our former works on several available and private data sets acquired on different sensors demonstrated that there are different categories of signatures that emerge automatically with clustering techniques, based on an entropy-based data quality measure. The behavior of such categories is totally different when confronted to automatic verification systems in terms of vulnerability to attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel and original strategy to reinforce identity security by enhancing signature resistance to attacks, assessed per signature category, both in terms of data quality and verification performance. This strategy operates upstream from the verification system, at the sensor level, by enriching the information content of signatures with personal handwritten inputs of different types. We study this strategy on different signature types of 74 users, acquired in uncontrolled mobile conditions on a largely deployed mobile touch-screen sensor. Our analysis per writer category revealed that adding alphanumeric (date) and handwriting (place) information to the usual signature is the most powerful augmented signature type in terms of verification performance. The relative improvement for all user categories is of at least 93% compared to the usual signature.