A novel optimal wavelet filter banks for automated diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment using Electroencephalogram signals

Electroencephalogram (EEG) of Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients show a slowing effect and less synchronization. EEG signal's transient and abrupt nature is captured from various mother wavelets. However, better performance can be obtained by balancing time-frequency localization in wavelet filters. We propose a new approach for designing filter banks based on optimal time-frequency localization of a four-step lifting structure (FSLS). First, we design a FSLS using Euler's Frobenius half-band polynomial (EFHBP). The perfect reconstruction condition and vanishing moments are imposed on EFHBP to achieve maximum flat half-band filters (HBFs). HBFs are optimized using a balanced uncertainty metric to obtain a time-frequency spread balance. Afterward, these HBFs are used in the FSLS to obtain the synthesis and analysis filter banks. The proposed time-frequency optimized biorthogonal wavelet filter banks (TFOBWFBs) achieved a balance between time-frequency localization. Further, these TFOBWFBs are applied to decompose the EEG signals of AD patients. Twenty different features were extracted from decomposed EEG subbands, of which twelve significant features were selected using Kruskal Walli's test. The machine learning models were trained and tested using obtained features with 10-fold cross-validation and leave-one-subject-out cross-validation. To validate this study, the proposed TFOBWFBs have been applied to two publicly available EEG datasets of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), AD, and healthy control (HC) subjects. The proposed TFOBWFBs achieved 98.90% accuracy for 2-way (AD vs. HC) and 96.50% for 3-way (AD vs. MCI vs. HC) classification using a support vector machine model with a 10-fold cross-validation. The proposed method outperforms the existing AD and MCI detection techniques. The performance of the proposed machine learning framework with optimization of wavelet filter banks is more significant and fast compared to previous studies. Also, the proposed framework can be applied to detect other neurodegenerative disorders.