K-Ortalamalar Kümeleme Yöntemi Kullanılarak ALS Hastalarında Dikkatin Olaya İlişkin Potansiyel Sinyalleri İle İncelenmesi

Abstract

Abnormal conditions occurring in the brain caused by different neurological diseases affect many people worldwide. One of these abnormal conditions is Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). ALS is a disease commonly known as motor neuron disease, which causes physical disorders in the area called brainstem, caused by damage to motor nerve cells. The brain perceives the stimuli coming from the outside and selects the related ones from the many perceived stimuli through its attention mechanism. Attention is a cognitive process that is formed by concentrating various types of information, activities such as emotions and thoughts to a region and selecting the relevant stimulants by the brain in the required time. The Electroencephalography (EEG) has an important place to measure and analyze such activities occurring in the brain's mind. Recent studies for attention analysis are on Event-Related Potential (ERP) signals. ERP signals are small amplitude signals with components such as P100, N200, P300 and N400, which are not clearly visible in EEG signals. For this reason, in order to obtain the ERP signals, the target stimulus must be repeated and EEG recording must be obtained many times. As a result of averaging the EEG signals of the recorded target stimulus, ERP signals are obtained. In the study carried out, it was aimed to obtain some features from the ERP signals of ALS patients and healthy people and to analyze attention analysis against visual stimuli using the k-means clustering method. As a result of the examination made with the K-averages clustering method, the data were divided into 2 clusters and the highest success rate was calculated as 77.78%.