Long range temporal correlations in EEG oscillations of subclinically depressed individuals: their association with brooding and suppression

Behavioral state-dependent associations between EEG temporal correlations and depressive symptoms

Previous studies have shown abnormal long-range temporal correlations in neuronal oscillations among individuals with Major Depressive Disorders, occurring during both resting states and transitions between resting and task states. However, the understanding of this effect in preclinical individuals with depression remains limited. This study investigated the association between temporal correlations of neuronal oscillations and depressive symptoms during resting and task states in preclinical individuals, specifically focusing on male action video gaming experts. Detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA), Lifetimes, and Waitingtimes were employed to explore temporal correlations across long-range and short-range scales. The results indicated widespread changes from the resting state to the task state across all frequency bands and temporal scales. Rest-task DFA changes in the alpha band exhibited a negative correlation with depressive scores at most electrodes. Significant positive correlations between DFA values and depressive scores were observed in the alpha band during the resting state but not in the task state. Similar patterns of results emerged concerning maladaptive negative emotion regulation strategies. Additionally, short-range temporal correlations in the alpha band echoed the DFA results. These findings underscore the state-dependent relationships between temporal correlations of neuronal oscillations and depressive symptoms, as well as maladaptive emotion regulation strategies, in preclinical individuals.

Decoding emotion with phase-amplitude fusion features of EEG functional connectivity network

Decoding emotional neural representations from the electroencephalographic (EEG)-based functional connectivity network (FCN) is of great scientific importance for uncovering emotional cognition mechanisms and developing harmonious human-computer interactions. However, existing methods mainly rely on phase-based FCN measures (e.g., phase locking value [PLV]) to capture dynamic interactions between brain oscillations in emotional states, which fail to reflect the energy fluctuation of cortical oscillations over time. In this study, we initially examined the efficacy of amplitude-based functional networks (e.g., amplitude envelope correlation [AEC]) in representing emotional states. Subsequently, we proposed an efficient phase-amplitude fusion framework (PAF) to fuse PLV and AEC and used common spatial pattern (CSP) to extract fused spatial topological features from PAF for multi-class emotion recognition. We conducted extensive experiments on the DEAP and MAHNOB-HCI datasets. The results showed that: (1) AEC-derived discriminative spatial network topological features possess the ability to characterize emotional states, and the differential network patterns of AEC reflect dynamic interactions in brain regions associated with emotional cognition. (2) The proposed fusion features outperformed other state-of-the-art methods in terms of classification accuracy for both datasets. Moreover, the spatial filter learned from PAF is separable and interpretable, enabling a description of affective activation patterns from both phase and amplitude perspectives.

Prediction of response to repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation for major depressive disorder using hybrid Convolutional recurrent neural networks and raw Electroencephalogram Signal

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a high prevalence disease that needs an effective and timely treatment to prevent its progress and additional costs. Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) is an effective treatment option for MDD patients which uses strong magnetic pulses to stimulate specific regions of the brain. However, some patients do not respond to this treatment which causes the waste of multiple weeks as treatment time and clinical resources. Therefore developing an effective way for the prediction of response to the rTMS treatment of depression is necessary. In this work, we proposed a hybrid model created by pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) models and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) cells to predict response to rTMS treatment from raw EEG signal. Three pre-trained CNN models named VGG16, InceptionResNetV2, and EffecientNetB0 were utilized as Transfer Learning (TL) models to construct hybrid TL-BLSTM models. Then an ensemble of these models was created using weighted majority voting which the weights were optimized by Differential Evolution (DE) optimization algorithm. Evaluation of these models shows the superior performance of the ensemble model by the accuracy of 98.51%, sensitivity of 98.64%, specificity of 98.36%, F1-score of 98.6%, and AUC of 98.5%. Therefore, the ensemble of the proposed hybrid convolutional recurrent networks can efficiently predict the treatment outcome of rTMS using raw EEG data.

The role of comorbid depressive symptoms on long-range temporal correlations in resting EEG in adults with ADHD

Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder, characterized by core symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity. Comorbid depression is commonly observed in ADHD-patients. Psychostimulants are recommended as first-line treatment for ADHD. Aberrant long-range temporal correlations (LRTCs) of neuronal activities in resting-state are known to be associated with disorganized thinking and concentrating difficulties (typical in ADHD) and with maladaptive thinking (typical in depression). It has yet to be examined whether (1) LRTC occur in ADHD-patients, and if so, (2) whether LRTC might be a competent biomarker in ADHD comorbid with current depression and (3) how depression affects psychostimulant therapy of ADHD symptoms. The present study registered and compared LRTCs in different EEG frequency bands in 85 adults with ADHD between groups with (n = 28) and without (n = 57) additional depressive symptoms at baseline. Treatment-related changes in ADHD, depressive symptoms and LRTC were investigated in the whole population and within each group. Our results revealed significant LRTCs existed in all investigated frequency bands. There were, however, no significant LRTC-differences between ADHD-patients with and without depressive symptoms at baseline and no LRTC-changes following treatment. However, depressed ADHD patients did seem to benefit more from the therapy with psychostimulant based on self-report.

Differential classification of states of consciousness using envelope- and phase-based functional connectivity

The development of sophisticated computational tools to quantify changes in the brain's oscillatory dynamics across states of consciousness have included both envelope- and phase-based measures of functional connectivity (FC), but there are very few direct comparisons of these techniques using the same dataset. The goal of this study was to compare an envelope-based (i.e. Amplitude Envelope Correlation, AEC) and a phase-based (i.e. weighted Phase Lag Index, wPLI) measure of FC in their classification of states of consciousness. Nine healthy participants underwent a three-hour experimental anesthetic protocol with propofol induction and isoflurane maintenance, in which five minutes of 128-channel electroencephalography were recorded before, during, and after anesthetic-induced unconsciousness, at the following time points: Baseline; light sedation with propofol (Light Sedation); deep unconsciousness following three hours of surgical levels of anesthesia with isoflurane (Unconscious); five minutes prior to the recovery of consciousness (Pre-ROC); and three hours following the recovery of consciousness (Recovery). Support vector machine classification was applied to the source-localized EEG in the alpha (8-13 Hz) frequency band in order to investigate the ability of AEC and wPLI (separately and together) to discriminate i) the four states from Baseline; ii) Unconscious ("deep" unconsciousness) vs. Pre-ROC ("light" unconsciousness); and iii) responsiveness (Baseline, Light Sedation, Recovery) vs. unresponsiveness (Unconscious, Pre-ROC). AEC and wPLI yielded different patterns of global connectivity across states of consciousness, with AEC showing the strongest network connectivity during the Unconscious epoch, and wPLI showing the strongest connectivity during full consciousness (i.e., Baseline and Recovery). Both measures also demonstrated differential predictive contributions across participants and used different brain regions for classification. AEC showed higher classification accuracy overall, particularly for distinguishing anesthetic-induced unconsciousness from Baseline (83.7 ± 0.8%). AEC also showed stronger classification accuracy than wPLI when distinguishing Unconscious from Pre-ROC (i.e., "deep" from "light" unconsciousness) (AEC: 66.3 ± 1.2%; wPLI: 56.2 ± 1.3%), and when distinguishing between responsiveness and unresponsiveness (AEC: 76.0 ± 1.3%; wPLI: 63.6 ± 1.8%). Classification accuracy was not improved compared to AEC when both AEC and wPLI were combined. This analysis of source-localized EEG data demonstrates that envelope- and phase-based FC provide different information about states of consciousness but that, on a group level, AEC is better able to detect relative alterations in brain FC across levels of anesthetic-induced unconsciousness compared to wPLI.

Long-Range Temporal Correlations in Resting State Beta Oscillations are Reduced in Schizophrenia

Symptoms of schizophrenia (SCZ) are likely to be generated by genetically mediated synaptic dysfunction, which contribute to large-scale functional neural dysconnectivity. Recent electrophysiological studies suggest that this dysconnectivity is present not only at a spatial level but also at a temporal level, operationalized as long-range temporal correlations (LRTCs). Previous research suggests that alpha and beta frequency bands have weaker temporal stability in people with SCZ. This study sought to replicate these findings with high-density electroencephalography (EEG), enabling a spatially more accurate analysis of LRTC differences, and to test associations with characteristic SCZ symptoms and cognitive deficits. A 128-channel EEG was used to record eyes-open resting state brain activity of 23 people with SCZ and 24 matched healthy controls (HCs). LRTCs were derived for alpha (8-12 Hz) and beta (13-25 Hz) frequency bands. As an exploratory analysis, LRTC was source projected using sLoreta. People with SCZ showed an area of significantly reduced beta-band LRTC compared with HCs over bilateral posterior regions. There were no between-group differences in alpha-band activity. Individual symptoms of SCZ were not related to LRTC values nor were cognitive deficits. The study confirms that people with SCZ have reduced temporal stability in the beta frequency band. The absence of group differences in the alpha band may be attributed to the fact that people had, in contrast to previous studies, their eyes open in the current study. Taken together, our study confirms the utility of LRTC as a marker of network instability in people with SCZ and provides a novel empirical perspective for future examinations of network dysfunction salience in SCZ research.

A Parsimonious Granger Causality Formulation for Capturing Arbitrarily Long Multivariate Associations

High-frequency neuroelectric signals like electroencephalography (EEG) or magnetoencephalography (MEG) provide a unique opportunity to infer causal relationships between local activity of brain areas. While causal inference is commonly performed through classical Granger causality (GC) based on multivariate autoregressive models, this method may encounter important limitations (e.g., data paucity) in the case of high dimensional data from densely connected systems like the brain. Additionally, physiological signals often present long-range dependencies which commonly require high autoregressive model orders/number of parameters. We present a generalization of autoregressive models for GC estimation based on Wiener–Volterra decompositions with Laguerre polynomials as basis functions. In this basis, the introduction of only one additional global parameter allows to capture arbitrary long dependencies without increasing model order, hence retaining model simplicity, linearity and ease of parameters estimation. We validate our method in synthetic data generated from families of complex, densely connected networks and demonstrate superior performance as compared to classical GC. Additionally, we apply our framework to studying the directed human brain connectome through MEG data from 89 subjects drawn from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) database, showing that it is able to reproduce current knowledge as well as to uncover previously unknown directed influences between cortical and limbic brain regions.

Music of brain and music on brain: a novel EEG sonification approach

Can we hear the sound of our brain? Is there any technique which can enable us to hear the neuro-electrical impulses originating from the different lobes of brain? The answer to all these questions is YES. In this paper we present a novel method with which we can sonify the electroencephalogram (EEG) data recorded in "control" state as well as under the influence of a simple acoustical stimuli-a tanpura drone. The tanpura has a very simple construction yet the tanpura drone exhibits very complex acoustic features, which is generally used for creation of an ambience during a musical performance. Hence, for this pilot project we chose to study the nonlinear correlations between musical stimulus (tanpura drone as well as music clips) and sonified EEG data. Till date, there have been no study which deals with the direct correlation between a bio-signal and its acoustic counterpart and also tries to see how that correlation varies under the influence of different types of stimuli. This study tries to bridge this gap and looks for a direct correlation between music signal and EEG data using a robust mathematical microscope called Multifractal Detrended Cross Correlation Analysis (MFDXA). For this, we took EEG data of 10 participants in 2 min "control condition" (i.e. with white noise) and in 2 min 'tanpura drone' (musical stimulus) listening condition. The same experimental paradigm was repeated for two emotional music, "Chayanat" and "Darbari Kanada". These are well known Hindustani classical ragas which conventionally portray contrast emotional attributes, also verified from human response data. Next, the EEG signals from different electrodes were sonified and MFDXA technique was used to assess the degree of correlation (or the cross correlation coefficient γx) between the EEG signals and the music clips. The variation of γx for different lobes of brain during the course of the experiment provides interesting new information regarding the extraordinary ability of music stimuli to engage several areas of the brain significantly unlike any other stimuli (which engages specific domains only).

EEG classification of driver mental states by deep learning

Driver fatigue is attracting more and more attention, as it is the main cause of traffic accidents, which bring great harm to society and families. This paper proposes to use deep convolutional neural networks, and deep residual learning, to predict the mental states of drivers from electroencephalography (EEG) signals. Accordingly we have developed two mental state classification models called EEG-Conv and EEG-Conv-R. Tested on intra- and inter-subject, our results show that both models outperform the traditional LSTM- and SVM-based classifiers. Our major findings include (1) Both EEG-Conv and EEG-Conv-R yield very good classification performance for mental state prediction; (2) EEG-Conv-R is more suitable for inter-subject mental state prediction; (3) EEG-Conv-R converges more quickly than EEG-Conv. In summary, our proposed classifiers have better predictive power and are promising for application in practical brain-computer interaction .

Long-range temporal correlations in the brain distinguish conscious wakefulness from induced unconsciousness

Rhythmic neuronal synchronization across large-scale networks is thought to play a key role in the regulation of conscious states. Changes in neuronal oscillation amplitude across states of consciousness have been widely reported, but little is known about possible changes in the temporal dynamics of these oscillations. The temporal structure of brain oscillations may provide novel insights into the neural mechanisms underlying consciousness. To address this question, we examined long-range temporal correlations (LRTC) of EEG oscillation amplitudes recorded during both wakefulness and anesthetic-induced unconsciousness. Importantly, the time-varying EEG oscillation envelopes were assessed over the course of a sevoflurane sedation protocol during which the participants alternated between states of consciousness and unconsciousness. Both spectral power and LRTC in oscillation amplitude were computed across multiple frequency bands. State-dependent differences in these features were assessed using non-parametric tests and supervised machine learning. We found that periods of unconsciousness were associated with increases in LRTC in beta (15-30Hz) amplitude over frontocentral channels and with a suppression of alpha (8-13Hz) amplitude over occipitoparietal electrodes. Moreover, classifiers trained to predict states of consciousness on single epochs demonstrated that the combination of beta LRTC with alpha amplitude provided the highest classification accuracy (above 80%). These results suggest that loss of consciousness is accompanied by an augmentation of temporal persistence in neuronal oscillation amplitude, which may reflect an increase in regularity and a decrease in network repertoire compared to the brain's activity during resting-state consciousness.

Long-range temporal correlations of broadband EEG oscillations for depressed subjects following different hemispheric cerebral infarction

Abnormal long-range temporal correlation (LRTC) in EEG oscillation has been observed in several brain pathologies and mental disorders. This study examined the relationship between the LRTC of broadband EEG oscillation and depression following cerebral infarction with different hemispheric lesions to provide a novel insight into such depressive disorders. Resting EEGs of 16 channels in 18 depressed (9 left and 9 right lesions) and 21 non-depressed (11 left and 10 right lesions) subjects following cerebral infarction and 19 healthy control subjects were analysed by means of detrended fluctuation analysis, a quantitative measurement of LRTC. The difference among groups and the correlation between the severity of depression and LRTC in EEG oscillation were investigated by statistical analysis. The results showed that LRTC of broadband EEG oscillations in depressive subjects was still preserved but attenuated in right hemispheric lesion subjects especially in left pre-frontal and right inferior frontal and posterior temporal regions. Moreover, an association between the severity of psychiatric symptoms and the attenuation of the LRTC was found in frontal, central and temporal regions for stroke subjects with right lesions. A high discriminating ability of the LRTC in the frontal and central regions to distinguish depressive from non-depressive subjects suggested potential feasibility for LRTC as an assessment indicator for depression following right hemispheric cerebral infarction. Different performance of temporal correlation in depressed subjects following the two hemispheric lesions implied complex association between depression and stroke lesion location.

Scale-freeness of dominant and piecemeal perceptions during binocular rivalry

When two eyes are simultaneously stimulated by two inconsistent images, the observer's perception switches between the two images every few seconds such that only one image is perceived at a time. This phenomenon is named binocular rivalry (BR). However, sometimes the perceived image is a piecemeal mixed of two stimuli known as piecemeal perceptions. In this study, a BR task was designed in which orthogonal gratings are presented to the two eyes. The subjects were trained to report 3 states: dominant perceptions (two state matching to perceived grating orientation) and the piecemeal perceptions (third state). We explored the scale-freeness of the BR percept durations considering the two dominant monocular states as well as the piecemeal transition state using detrended fluctuation analysis. Our results reproduced the previous finding of memory in the perceptual switches between the monocular perception states. Moreover, we showed that such memory also exists in the transitory periods of dichoptic piecemeal perceptions. These results support our hypothesis that the pool of unstable piecemeal perceptions could be regarded as separate multiple low-depth basin in the perceptual state landscape. Likewise, the transitions from these piecemeal state basins and stable monocular state basins are faced with resistance. Therefore there is inertia and memory (i.e. positive serial correlation) for the piecemeal dichoptic perception states as well as the monocular states.

Aberrant Long-Range Temporal Correlations in Depression Are Attenuated after Psychological Treatment

The spontaneous oscillatory activity in the human brain shows long-range temporal correlations (LRTC) that extend over time scales of seconds to minutes. Previous research has demonstrated aberrant LRTC in depressed patients; however, it is unknown whether the neuronal dynamics normalize after psychological treatment. In this study, we recorded EEG during eyes-closed rest in depressed patients (N = 71) and healthy controls (N = 25), and investigated the temporal dynamics in depressed patients at baseline, and after attending either a brief mindfulness training or a stress reduction training. Compared to the healthy controls, depressed patients showed stronger LRTC in theta oscillations (4-7 Hz) at baseline. Following the psychological interventions both groups of patients demonstrated reduced LRTC in the theta band. The reduction of theta LRTC differed marginally between the groups, and explorative analyses of separate groups revealed noteworthy topographic differences. A positive relationship between the changes in LRTC, and changes in depressive symptoms was observed in the mindfulness group. In summary, our data show that aberrant temporal dynamics of ongoing oscillations in depressive patients are attenuated after treatment, and thus may help uncover the mechanisms with which psychotherapeutic interventions affect the brain.

Affective pictures processing is reflected by an increased long-distance EEG connectivity

Analysis of affective picture processing by means of EEG has invaded the literature. The methodology of event-related EEG coherence is one of the essential methods used to analyze functional connectivity. The aims of the present study are to find out the long range EEG connectivity changes in perception of different affective pictures and analyze gender differences in these long range connected networks. EEGs of 28 healthy subjects (14 female) were recorded at 32 locations. The participants passively viewed emotional pictures (IAPS, unpleasant, pleasant, neutral). The long-distance intra-hemispheric event-related coherence was analyzed for delta (1-3.5 Hz), theta (4-7.5 Hz), and alpha (8-13 Hz) frequency ranges for F₃-T₇, F₄-T₈, F₃-TP₇, F₄-TP₈, F₃-P₃, F₄-P₄, F₃-O₁, F₄-O₂, C₃-O₁, C₄-O₂ electrode pairs. Unpleasant pictures elicited significantly higher delta coherence values than neutral pictures (p < 0.05), over fronto-parietal, fronto-occipital, and centro-occipital electrode pairs. Furthermore, unpleasant pictures elicited higher theta coherence values than pleasant (p < 0.05) and neutral pictures (p < 0.05). The present study showed that female subjects had higher delta (p < 0.05) and theta (p < 0.05) coherence values than male subjects. This difference was observed more for emotional pictures than for neutral pictures. This study showed that the brain connectivity was higher during emotional pictures than neutral pictures. Females had higher connectivity between different parts of the brain than males during emotional processes. According to these results, we may comment that increased valence and arousal caused increased brain activity. It seems that not just single sources but functional networks were also activated during perception of emotional pictures.

The long-range temporal correlations of broadband EEG oscillations in poststroke depression subjects with basal ganglia infarction

Recent studies have found long-range temporal correlations (LRTC) of neuronal oscillation under different physiological and pathological state. In this paper we aimed to explore the temporal correlations of broadband neuronal oscillation in poststroke depression. Resting state EEGs of 16 electrodes in 16 poststroke depression (PSD), 18 poststroke non-depression (PSND) and 18 healthy control (HC) subjects were analyzed by means of detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA), a quantitative measurement of LRTC. The results indicated that LRTC of broadband oscillation in PSD subjects was still preserved and had similar spatial distribution to non-depression subjects, but attenuated especially in left hemisphere and frontal and posterior temporal regions of right hemisphere. Moreover, a linear correlation between the severity of psychiatric symptoms and attenuation of LRTC was observed in stroke subjects. ROC curves indicated a high discriminating ability of scaling exponents in prefrontal regions distinguishing PSD from PSND, suggesting the feasibility for LRTC as assessment indicators to PSD.

Detrended fluctuation analysis for major depressive disorder

Clinical utility of Electroencephalography (EEG) based diagnostic studies is less clear for major depressive disorder (MDD). In this paper, a novel machine learning (ML) scheme was presented to discriminate the MDD patients and healthy controls. The proposed method inherently involved feature extraction, selection, classification and validation. The EEG data acquisition involved eyes closed (EC) and eyes open (EO) conditions. At feature extraction stage, the de-trended fluctuation analysis (DFA) was performed, based on the EEG data, to achieve scaling exponents. The DFA was performed to analyzes the presence or absence of long-range temporal correlations (LRTC) in the recorded EEG data. The scaling exponents were used as input features to our proposed system. At feature selection stage, 3 different techniques were used for comparison purposes. Logistic regression (LR) classifier was employed. The method was validated by a 10-fold cross-validation. As results, we have observed that the effect of 3 different reference montages on the computed features. The proposed method employed 3 different types of feature selection techniques for comparison purposes as well. The results show that the DFA analysis performed better in LE data compared with the IR and AR data. In addition, during Wilcoxon ranking, the AR performed better than LE and IR. Based on the results, it was concluded that the DFA provided useful information to discriminate the MDD patients and with further validation can be employed in clinics for diagnosis of MDD.

The electrocortical modulation effects of different emotion regulation strategies

The current event-related potential study investigated the modulation effects of different emotion regulation strategies on electrocortical responses. When watching negative or neutral pictures, participants were instructed to perform three tasks: cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression and passive viewing. We found that negative pictures elicited a larger late positive potential (LPP) than neutral pictures. Moreover, processes involved in strategy also had an effect on LPP amplitude, which was indicated by a larger LPP in reappraisal compared with suppression and viewing tasks when neutral pictures were presented. After the influence of processes on LPP was excluded, results showed that reappraisal effectively decreased the emotion-enhanced LPP than suppression and viewing. The difference in regulatory effect may be determined by the underlying processing mechanism. A larger frontal-central component, N2, was observed in suppression than reappraisal and viewing, which suggested that it involved the processes focusing on behavioral response. While the larger LPP found in reappraisal implicated that it recruited cognitive processes focusing on the picture meaning.