An evaluation on changes in Hippocampus size for Cognitively Normal (CN), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients using Fuzzy Membership Function

Background: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurological disorder where the hippocampus in the brain gets affected severely. Hippocampus is a part of the limbic system, which is mainly responsible for forming memories. The transition from Cognitively Normal (CN) to AD is having one intermittent stage, popularly known as Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). In this study, segmentation operation has been performed first to separate the hippocampus, and then an analysis has been made on the basis of changes in area and atrophy in the hippocampus. A total of “2008” numbers of MR images have been analyzed for three different subject groups consist of “210” different subjects (Male:105, Female: 105) namely, CN, MCI, and AD.Objective: The objective of this study is to analyze the size and atrophy of the hippocampus due to AD and MCI in comparison with CN patients.Material and Methods: All the experiments have done using MATLAB tools. All the data used is acquired from the online dataset “Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI)”.Results: From the study, it is found that the average difference in the size of the hippocampus between CN and MCI is 17.05%, between CN and AD is 31.90%, and between MCI and AD is 18.24%. The average atrophy per year in the hippocampus is found to be as 4.62% for AD, 2.33% for MCI, and 1.10% for CN subjects.Conclusions: From the study, it is observed that, for AD patients, hippocampus atrophy is highest, and hence they experience the highest memory loss followed by the MCI and CN patients.