The digital symbol digit test : screening for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's

Neurodegenerative diseases affect the cognition of millions of people worldwide, degrading their quality of life and placing a burden on their families. Early identication can be extremely beneficial in treating or slowing down the onset of these diseases. One technique used to identify early warning signs is the use of cognitive tests. Unfortunately, grading these tests is subjective. In this study, we quantitatively evaluated the digital Symbol Digit Test (dSDT), in which patients translate symbols into digits based on a given mapping. In collaboration with Dr. Penney of Lahey Clinic, we administered the dSDT to over 170 patients using a digitizing pen that measures its position on the page and the pressure applied. We developed support vector machine and logistic regression classifiers that indicate Alzheimer's Disease and Parkinson's Disease with an area under the curve of 0.957 and 0.963, respectively.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Huang, Lauren(Lauren A.)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Randall Davis.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122052

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/122052