Discrimination of alcoholics from non-alcoholics using supervised learning on resting EEG

Alcoholism is a widespread problem that can have serious medical consequences. Alcoholism screening tests are used to identify patients who are at risk for complications from alcohol abuse, but accurate diagnosis of alcohol dependence must be done by structured clinical interview. Scalp Electroencephalography (EEG) is a noisy, non-stationary signal produced by an aggregate of brain activity from neurons close to the scalp. Previous research has identified a relationship between information extracted from resting scalp EEG and alcoholism, but it has not been established if this relationship is strong enough to have meaningful diagnostic utility. In this thesis, we investigate the efficacy of using supervised machine learning on resting scalp EEG data to build models that can match clinical diagnoses of alcohol dependence. We extract features from four minute eyes-closed resting scalp EEG recordings, and use these features to train discriminative models for identifying alcohol dependence. We found that we can achieve an average AUROC of .65 in males, and .63 in females. These results suggest that a diagnostic tool could use scalp EEG data to diagnose alcohol dependence with better than random performance. However, further investigation is required to evaluate the generalizability of our results.

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

2014

Author dc:creator

• Brooks, Joel David

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• John Guttag.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

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

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/87943

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/87943