Synchrony analysis of spontaneous MEG activity in Alzheimer's disease patients

The aim of this study was to analyze the magnetoencephalography (MEG) background activity in Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients using cross-approximate entropy (Cross-ApEn). Cross-ApEn is a nonlinear measure of asynchrony between time series. Five minutes of recording were acquired with a 148-channel whole-head magnetometer in 12 AD patients and 12 age-matched control subjects. We found significantly higher synchrony between MEG signals from AD patients compared with control subjects. Additionally, we evaluated the ability of Cross-ApEn to discriminate these two groups using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves with a leave-one-out cross-validation procedure. We obtained an accuracy of 70.83% (66.67% sensitivity, 75% specificity) and a value of area under the ROC curve of 0.83. These results provide evidence of disconnection problems in AD. Our findings show the usefulness of Cross-ApEn to detect the brain dysfunction in AD.