A Noninvasive Device-Based Approach to Aid in the Diagnosis of Mtbi and Alzheimer's Disease: Preliminary Findings from Clinical Pilot Studies

Non-invasive biomarkers are emerging as essential tools for the development of effective drugs and as aids to primary care physicians and neurologists. Static imaging (MRI/PET/SPECT) and fluid based (blood and CSF) biomarkers have the inherent limitation that they don't typically capture brain physiology and dynamic processes. Cerora is developing its MindReader™ platform as a non-invasive, accurate, accessible and affordable mobile solution to aid in the diagnosis of mTBI and Alzheimer's. The present study extends an activated EEG medical device for the physiological assessment of brain health looking at multivariate classifiers from both mild Traumatic Brain Injury (Concussion) as well as Alzheimer's disease. Recent advances in wireless electroencephalography (EEG) hardware have enabled the development of a novel activated EEG system (MindReader TM) to physiologically focus the assessment of brain health to various sensory circuits and cognitive tasks. The MindReader assesses brain function while actively stimulating the subject with various sensory and cognitive stimuli. At AAIC Vancouver, Cerora reported diagnostic signatures which discriminated AD from controls in a small pilot study which replicated and extended the published EEG diagnostic literature. This year, pilot diagnostic data were collected in concussed and healthy controls using a similar but different physiologically focused data acquisition paradigm. This presentation will provide an overview of the device along with the “cloud” based neuro diagnostics as a service IT infrastructure. Univariate and multivariate statistical models were built looking for meaningful predictors of concussion (mTBI). More advanced techniques like tree based methods, boosting, and neural nets were also assessed using the pilot concussion data. Comparison between Alzheimer's and concussion features will be highlighted. A physiologically focused battery of activated EEG tasks is able to probe elements of brain circuits not presently assessed with standard resting state (Eyes Open or Eyes Closed) quantitative EEG. The MindReader offers a novel alternative to rapidly, portably and non-invasively assess brain health and function. Multi-variate predictive models offer an opportunity to enhance classifier performance, although further work is required to develop the necessary activated EEG signatures to map the brain for its physiologic defects.