Computerized mapping system of cerebral evoked potentials

Reduction of ocular artefacts in source current density brain mappings by ARX2 filtering

Sweep by sweep analysis of event-related potentials (ERP) of the human scalp represents a reliable tool for both the diagnosis of neurologic diseases and the study of the central nervous system during cognitive tasks. The off-line procedure based on stochastic parametric identification and filtering herewith described, allows an accurate analysis of single-sweep ERP and a drastic reduction of ocular artefacts variously propagating through the skull. Moreover, the spatial distribution of the recorded ERP in bidimensional form was enhanced by using the Laplacian operator in order to get an estimate of the source current density (SCD) flow from the skull into the scalp. Complete single-trial signals were filtered according to an autoregressive model of signal generation with 2 exogenous inputs (ARX2). The ARX2 procedure models the recorded signal as the sum of three signals: (a) the background EEG activity, modelled as an autoregressive process driven by a white noise; (b) a filtered version of a reference signal carrying the average information contained in each sweep; (c) a signal due to the ocular artefact propagation. The evaluation of the effect of artefact suppression on those channels close to the eyes was compared with standard ordinary least squares method (OLS) based on a linear model of the influence of EOG on ERP. Finally, the better results obtainable through ARX filtering on sweep-by-sweep brain mappings are also presented.

Statistical analysis of topographic maps of short-latency somatosensory evoked potentials in normal and parkinsonian subjects

This work had the following objectives: i) to integrate temporal analysis (N30 peak) with power-spectrum topographic mapping of short-latency somatosensory evoked potentials (SEP's) recorded in parkinsonian and normal control subjects; and ii) to analyze with a new statistical approach the between-group topographical differences in both the time and frequency domains. The principal aim was to better determine the topography of the scalp frontal areas where the amplitude of the N30 wave was previously found to be significantly reduced in parkinsonians. The statistical procedure was based on the combined use of descriptive data analysis (DDA) and multivariate analysis. In the context of DDA, an improved version of significance probability mapping (SPM) was used by which it is possible to evaluate homo- and nonhomoscedastic data with parametric tests. The statistical evaluation of between-group differences was performed with the multivariate Hotelling's T2 test and the associated post hoc test. With this statistical procedure, it was possible to determine that the between-group statistical differences in both the temporal and power spectrum distributions were localized only in midline and contiguous contralateral frontal areas of the scalp.