Spatial analysis of EEG signals for Parkinson’s disease stage detection

Abstract

Diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease (PD) in the early stages is very critical for effective treatments. In this paper, we propose a simple and low-cost biomarker to diagnose PD, using the electroencephalography (EEG) signals. In the proposed method, EEG is used to detect the brain electrical activities in internal regions of brain, e.g., basal ganglia (BG). Based on the high correlation between PD and brain activities in the BG, the proposed method provides a highly accurate PD diagnostic measure. Moreover, we obtain a quantitative measure of the disease severity, using the spectral analysis of extracted brain sources. The proposed method is denoted by Parkinson’s disease stage detection (PDSD). The PDSD includes brain sources separation and localization steps. The accuracy of the method in detection and quantification of PD is evaluated and verified by using information of ten patients and ten healthy people. The results show that there is a significant difference in the number of brain sources within the BG region, as well as their power spectral density, between healthy cases and patients. The accuracy and the cross-validation error of PDSD to detect PD are 95% and 6.25%, respectively. Furthermore, it is shown that the total power of extracted brain sources within the BG region in the $$\alpha $$ and $$\beta $$ rhythms can be used effectively to determine the severity of PD.