Does EEG montage influence Alzheimer's disease electroclinic diagnosis?

There is not a specific Alzheimer's disease (AD) diagnostic test. AD diagnosis relies on clinical history, neuropsychological, and laboratory tests, neuroimaging and electroencephalography. Therefore, new approaches are necessary to enable earlier and more accurate diagnosis and to measure treatment results. Quantitative EEG (qEEG) can be used as a diagnostic tool in selected cases. The aim of this study was to answer if distinct electrode montages have different sensitivity when differentiating controls from AD patients. We analyzed EEG spectral peaks (delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma bands), and we compared references (Biauricular, Longitudinal bipolar, Crossed bipolar, Counterpart bipolar, and Cz reference). Support Vector Machines and Logistic Regression classifiers showed Counterpart bipolar montage as the most sensitive electrode combination. Our results suggest that Counterpart bipolar montage is the best choice to study EEG spectral peaks of controls versus AD.