Improved Classification Accuracy of MCI Patients After Acupuncture Treatment: An fNIRS Study

The mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a cognitive disorder described by deficiency in memory, vocabulary, understanding, and reasoning. This impairment has an abundant likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Therefore, the classification of MCI or prodromal stage of AD is critical to assess at earliest for understanding and treating the disease. In this study, a functional near-infrared spectroscopy was employed to measure the concentration changes of oxygenated hemoglobin (ΔHbO) from the prefrontal cortex of eleven healthy control (HC) and MCI patients each during the working memory task. Several temporal features such as slope, mean, kurtosis, skewness, peak values, and their combinations were tested for better assessment of MCI patients. We further investigate the effect of acupuncture treatment on MCI patients. Both groups went through fNIRS recording procedure with a gap of 1.5 months. However, before visit-1, only the patient group undergoes acupuncture treatment twice per week for six weeks. The classification using linear discriminant analysis (LDA) was performed to check any improvement in classification accuracies of patient group after acupuncture treatment. The average classification accuracy obtained in visit-1 (after acupuncture treatment) on MCI patients was increased up to 73% with a couple feature mean-skewness, which was 69% in visit-0 (before acupuncture treatment). With a couple mean-slope and mean-kurtosis as feature, up to 8% increase was observed in visit-1. The significance of this study is that acupuncture can be a useful treatment tool for the betterment of MCI patients.