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The apolipoprotein E epsilon 4 allele (APOE4) and family history of dementia (FH) are well-known risk factors for the development of sporadic Alzheimer's disease. We assessed the effects of these risk factors on gray matter (GM) volume in 295 cognitively healthy middle-aged community-dwelling subjects. Voxel-based morphometry was used to study GM volume differences between high-and low-risk subjects, based on APOE4 carriership (n = 74), first-degree FH (n = 228), or both (n = 62). No significant results were found using a corrected p value. Using a more lenient threshold (p

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most prevalent form of progressive degenerative dementia. Its diagnosis made by analyzing many biomarkers and test but nowadays a definitive confirmation requires a post-mortem examination of the patients' brain tissue. The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential of applying intelligent algorithms to the results obtained from non-invasive analysis methods on suspected patients in order to contribute to the improvement of both early diagnosis of AD and its degree of severity. This work deals with Emotional Response Automatic Analysis (ERAA) based on classical and new speech features: Emotional Temperature (ET) and Higuchi Fractal Dimension (FD). The method has the great advantage of being, in addition to non-invasive, of low cost and without any side effects. This is a pre-clinic studio oriented to validate future diagnosis tests and biomarkers. ERAA showed very satisfactory and promising results for the definition of features oriented to early diagnosis of AD.

The work presented here is part of a larger study to identify novel technologies and biomarkers for early Alzheimer disease (AD) detection and it focuses on evaluating the suitability of a new approach for early AD diagnosis by non-invasive methods. The purpose is to examine in a pilot study the potential of applying intelligent algorithms to speech features obtained from suspected patients in order to contribute to the improvement of diagnosis of AD and its degree of severity. In this sense, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) have been used for the automatic classification of the two classes (AD and control subjects). Two human issues have been analyzed for feature selection: Spontaneous Speech and Emotional Response. Not only linear features but also non-linear ones, such as Fractal Dimension, have been explored. The approach is non invasive, low cost and without any side effects. Obtained experimental results were very satisfactory and promising for early diagnosis and classification of AD patients. his work has been partially supported by a SAIOTEK from the Basque Government, University of Vic under the research grant R0904, and the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion TEC2012-38630-C04-03. Iciar Martinez (Research Center for Experimental Marine Biology and Biotechnology-Plentziako Itsas Estazioa (PIE), University of the Basque Country & IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science

The purpose of our project is to contribute to earlier diagnosis of AD and better estimates of its severity by using automatic analysis performed through new biomarkers extracted from non-invasive intelligent methods. The methods selected in this case are speech biomarkers oriented to Sponta-neous Speech and Emotional Response Analysis. Thus the main goal of the present work is feature search in Spontaneous Speech oriented to pre-clinical evaluation for the definition of test for AD diagnosis by One-class classifier. One-class classifi-cation problem differs from multi-class classifier in one essen-tial aspect. In one-class classification it is assumed that only information of one of the classes, the target class, is available. In this work we explore the problem of imbalanced datasets that is particularly crucial in applications where the goal is to maximize recognition of the minority class as in medical diag-nosis. The use of information about outlier and Fractal Dimen-sion features improves the system performance.

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) speech production is being classicaly studied under different aspects as prosody, rhythmic or semantics, phonation being an unexplored field. The present work is devoted to the study of several cases under the scope of phonation, including AD speakers and healthy controls. Temporal events with interest in phonation are studied. These include fillers (spontaneous voiced pauses or lengthenings), which may be characterized by phonation biomechanics. Discrimination capabilities of biomechanical estimates as fundamental frequency and vocal fold body stiffness are used in comparative hypothesis tests between the study cases and a normative database, and among themselves. The conclusions derived pose the problem of normative database design, and the continuation of the research including other biomechanical correlates.