Improving the Quality of EEG Data in Patients with Alzheimer's Disease Using ICA

Does Independent Component Analysis (ICA) denature EEG signals? We applied ICA to two groups of subjects (mild Alzheimer patients and control subjects). The aim of this study was to examine whether or not the ICA method can reduce both group differences and within-subject variability. We found that ICA diminished Leave-OneOut root mean square error (RMSE) of validation (from 0.32 to 0.28), indicative of the reduction of group difference. More interestingly, ICA reduced the inter-subject variability within each group (σ = 2.54 in the δ range before ICA, σ = 1.56 after, Bartlett p = 0.046 after Bonferroni correction). Additionally, we present a method to limit the impact of human error ( 13.8%, with 75.6% inter-cleaner agreement) during ICA cleaning, and reduce human bias. These findings suggests the novel usefulness of ICA in clinical EEG in Alzheimer’s disease for reduction of subject variability.