The Study of Diagnosis of Early Alzheimer’s Disease Monitoring Mechanism

The objective of this research is established a cognitive ability biomarker system for the elderly and define the target biomarker of cognition by training and learning their cognitive abilities and stimulating the senses. According the analysis of cognitive biomarkers, we hope to detect the mental degradation of the elderly more early. This proposal will provide three services as following: (1) Active learning biomarker: Using technology of multimedia and human-computer interface, develop a series cognitive ability marker games. The characteristic of that game is the elderly need to learn and practice to finish the task by using their ability, such as memory, judgment, orientation, and language. And then, we can collect the data and build the biomarker of cognitive ability. When designing the games, we will define the ontology between the cognitive games and traditional scales, and base on personal background and medical history to establish an appropriate recommender system. So when we collect enough data, that we could recommend the best-fit scales for the elderly. (2) Passive stimulating biomarker: In the part, we mainly use the EEG technology to collect the reaction of areas of the brain, when they are doing some passive stimulating games, such as auditory and visual stimulation. Then we need to develop the EEG feature extraction algorithm and noise filtering algorithm, so that we will know the relationship between cognitive ability and the reaction areas. (3) Treatment activities biomarker: In the third part, the biomarker activities will be combined with non-drug treatment of dementia, such as reminiscence therapy and music therapy. And using the MRI technology, such as T1-weighted image, T2-weighted image, diffusion MRI and resting-state functional MRI, to observe the particular variant regions of the brain from the analysis of structural network, functional network and gray/white matter volume. The brain region can be also regarded as one of the cognitive biomarker. When we get these areas, we could investigate the corresponding cognitive functions and evaluate the efficiency of non-drug treatment of dementia. Finally, we will proceed with analyzing of reliability and validity of the biomarker system, and evaluating the performance for the entire system.

Project ID:PB10107-1735
External Project ID:NSC101-2221-E182-042