A deep learning approach to mild cognitive impairment detection from electroencephalogram signals

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is an important condition that may progress to Alzheimer disease (AD) or other types of dementia. If MCI can be detected early, timely interventions may be implemented. Traditional diagnostic methods rely on neuropsychological tests and imaging studies but have limitations in terms of efficiency and accessibility. Therefore, electroencephalogram (EEG)-based deep learning approaches represent promising developments that may offer new frameworks for the early diagnosis of MCI.

This study aimed to develop a long short-term memory (LSTM)-based architecture for classifying MCI using EEG signals. The temporal characteristics of EEG signals may reveal meaningful information that improves classification performance.

A publicly available EEG dataset comprising 27 subjects (11 MCI; 16 normal) was used. Raw EEG signals were preprocessed using band-pass filtering, Independent Component Analysis, and segmentation. The 64-node LSTM model was trained using processed EEG segments for binary classification. The model was evaluated using standard performance metrics.

The proposed LSTM-based model achieved an accuracy of 98.14% for MCI versus normal classification, outperforming conventional algorithms such as K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The model also demonstrated high precision (99.21%), recall (98.69%), and F1-score (98.95%). The confusion matrix showed 4,774 normal and 3,257 MCI segments correctly classified, with very few misclassifications, highlighting its strong discriminative capability.

This study highlights the potential of LSTM networks for early MCI detection. The findings suggest that deep learning-driven EEG analysis may be a valuable tool for noninvasive and scalable cognitive health assessments.