Use of Hypoxic Respiratory Challenge for Differentiating Alzheimer’s Disease and Wild-Type Mice Non-Invasively: A Diffuse Optical Spectroscopy Study

Alzheimer’s disease is one of the most critical brain diseases. The prevalence of the disease keeps rising due to increasing life spans. This study aims to examine the use of hemodynamic signals during hypoxic respiratory challenge for the differentiation of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and wild-type (WT) mice. Diffuse optical spectroscopy, an optical system that can non-invasively monitor transient changes in deoxygenated (ΔRHb) and oxygenated (ΔOHb) hemoglobin concentrations, was used to monitor hemodynamic reactivity during hypoxic respiratory challenges in an animal model. From the acquired signals, 13 hemodynamic features were extracted from each of ΔRHb and −ΔOHb (26 features total) for more in-depth analyses of the differences between AD and WT. The hemodynamic features were statistically analyzed and tested to explore the possibility of using machine learning (ML) to differentiate AD and WT. Among the twenty-six features, two features of ΔRHb and one feature of −ΔOHb showed statistically significant differences between AD and WT. Among ML techniques, a naive Bayes algorithm achieved the best accuracy of 84.3% when whole hemodynamic features were used for differentiation. While further works are required to improve the approach, the suggested approach has the potential to be an alternative method for the differentiation of AD and WT.