Complexity of weighted graph: A new technique to investigate structural complexity of brain activities with applications to aging and autism

Directed Weighted EEG Connectogram Insights of One-to-One Causality for Identifying Developmental Dyslexia

Developmental dyslexia (DD) affects approximately 5-12% of learners, posing persistent challenges in reading and writing. This study presents a novel electroencephalography (EEG)-based methodology for identifying DD using two auditory stimuli modulated at 4.8[Formula: see text]Hz (prosodic) and 40[Formula: see text]Hz (phonemic). EEG signals were processed to estimate one-to-one Granger causality, yielding directed and weighted connectivity matrices. A novel Mutually Informed Correlation Coefficient (MICC) feature selection method was employed to identify the most relevant causal links, which were visualized using connectograms. Under the 4.8[Formula: see text]Hz stimulus, altered theta-band connectivity between frontal and occipital regions indicated compensatory frontal activation for prosodic processing and visual-auditory integration difficulties, while gamma-band anomalies between occipital and temporal regions suggested impaired visual-prosodic integration. Classification analysis under the 4.8[Formula: see text]Hz stimulus yielded area under the ROC curve (AUC) values of 0.92 (theta) and 0.91 (gamma band). Under the 40[Formula: see text]Hz stimulus, theta abnormalities reflected dysfunctions in integrating auditory phoneme signals with executive and motor regions, and gamma alterations indicated difficulties coordinating visual and auditory inputs for phonological decoding, with AUC values of 0.84 (theta) and 0.89 (gamma). These results support both the Temporal Sampling Framework and the Phonological Core Deficit Hypothesis. Future research should extend the range of stimuli frequencies and include more diverse cohorts to further validate these potential biomarkers.

Multimodal Integration of EEG and Near-Infrared Spectroscopy for Robust Cross-Frequency Coupling Estimation

Neuroimaging techniques have had a major impact on medical science, allowing advances in the research of many neurological diseases and improving their diagnosis. In this context, multimodal neuroimaging approaches, based on the neurovascular coupling phenomenon, exploit their individual strengths to provide complementary information on the neural activity of the brain cortex. This work proposes a novel method for combining electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to explore the functional activity of the brain processes related to low-level language processing of skilled and dyslexic seven-year-old readers. We have transformed EEG signals into image sequences considering the interaction between different frequency bands by means of cross-frequency coupling (CFC), and applied an activation mask sequence obtained from the local functional brain activity inferred from simultaneously recorded fNIRS signals. Thus, the resulting image sequences preserve spatial and temporal information of the communication and interaction between different neural processes and provide discriminative information that allows differentiation between controls and dyslexic subjects with an AUC of 77.1%. Finally, explainability is improved by introducing an easily comprehensible representation of the SHAP values obtained for the classification method in the brainSHAP maps.

Assessing Laryngeal Neuromotor Activity from Phonation

Neurodegenerative motor disorders affect the neuromuscular system challenging daily life and normal activity. Parkinson's Disease (PD) is among the most prevalent ones, with a large impact and rising prevalence rates. Speech is most affected by PD as far as phonatory and articulatory performance is concerned. Neuromotor activity (NMA) alterations have an impact on larynx muscles responsible for vocal fold adduction and abduction, hampering phonation stability and regularity. The main muscular articulators involved in phonation control are the cricothyroid (tensor) and thyroarytenoid (relaxer) systems, regulated by two distinct direct neuromotor pathways, activated by the precentral gyrus laryngeal control areas. These articulations control the musculus vocalis, directly responsible for regular vocal fold vibration. An indirect estimation of the muscular tension produced by inverse filtering may split into two independent channels, assumed to be the tensor and relaxer neuromotor pathways such as the differential neuromotor activity (DNMA). The amplitude distributions of both DNMA channels allow comparing phonations from PD-affected persons (PDPs) and age-matched healthy control participants (HCPs) with respect to a set of reference mid-age normative participants (RSPs). The comparisons are carried out by Jensen-Shannon distributions of PDP and HCP phonations with respect to those of RSPs. A dataset of 96 phonation samples from participants balanced by gender is used to train a set of decision tree classifiers (DTCs) to distinguish PDP from HCP phonation. The best results from 10-fold cross-validation offered accumulated mismatches of 0.09 and 0.1292 for male and female subsets. The sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of the classification results when separating PDP from HCP phonatios were 93.33%, 88.23%, and 90.63% (male PDP versus HCP) and 92.86%, 83.33%, and 87.50% (female PDP versus HCP), providing a stratification of PDPs and HCPs by objective disease grading from explainable AI (XAI) methods.

Interactive EEG Emotion Recognition with Incremental Gaussian Processes

Interactivity is crucial for enabling models to adjust and optimize based on user feedback, thereby enhancing overall performance. However, existing electroencephalogram (EEG)-based emotion recognition models rely on static training paradigms, lack interactivity, and struggle to effectively handle uncertainty in predictions. To address this issue, we propose a novel paradigm for interactive emotion recognition based on incremental Gaussian processes (GP). Unlike existing methods, our approach introduces an expert interaction mechanism to correct samples with high predictive uncertainty and incrementally update the model accordingly, thereby optimizing its performance. First, we model the emotion recognition task as a GP-based framework, utilizing the variance of the GP to quantify the model's uncertainty, thereby guiding experts in targeted interactions. Second, within the GP framework, we propose a novel incremental update strategy that allows the GP to incrementally update prediction results and uncertainties based only on new data obtained through expert interactions, without reprocessing all existing data. This effectively overcomes the shortcomings of traditional GP in updating efficiency. Third, to address the high computational complexity of GP, we use a sparse approximation strategy, selecting inducing points and performing variational inference to efficiently approximate the GP posterior, thereby reducing computational complexity. Subject-dependent and subject-independent experiments conducted on the DEAP and DREAMER datasets demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits significant advantages over state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. In subject-dependent experiments, our method achieved the highest improvement (1.73%) in the Dominance dimension on the DREAMER dataset. In subject-independent experiments, it attained the largest performance improvement (2.96%) in the Arousal dimension on the DEAP dataset. These results further validate the proposed method's effectiveness.

Autism Spectrum Disorder Detection Using Prominent Connectivity Features from Electroencephalography

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a disorder of brain growth with great variability whose clinical presentation initially shows up during early stages or youth, and ASD follows a repetitive pattern of behavior in most cases. Accurate diagnosis of ASD has been difficult in clinical practice as there is currently no valid indicator of ASD. Since ASD is regarded as a neurodevelopmental disorder, brain signals specially electroencephalography (EEG) are an effective method for detecting ASD. Therefore, this research aims at developing a method of extracting features from EEG signal for discriminating between ASD and control subjects. This study applies six prominent connectivity features, namely Cross Correlation (XCOR), Phase Locking Value (PLV), Pearson's Correlation Coefficient (PCC), Mutual Information (MI), Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) and Transfer Entropy (TE), for feature extraction. The Connectivity Feature Maps (CFMs) are constructed and used for classification through Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). As CFMs contain spatial information, they are able to distinguish ASD and control subjects better than other features. Rigorous experimentation has been performed on the EEG datasets collected from Italy and Saudi Arabia according to different criteria. MI feature shows the best result for categorizing ASD and control participants with increased sample size and segmentation.

Deep Learning Recognition of Paroxysmal Kinesigenic Dyskinesia Based on EEG Functional Connectivity

Paroxysmal kinesigenic dyskinesia (PKD) is a rare neurological disorder marked by transient involuntary movements triggered by sudden actions. Current diagnostic approaches, including genetic screening, face challenges in identifying secondary cases due to symptom overlap with other disorders. This study introduces a novel PKD recognition method utilizing a resting-state electroencephalogram (EEG) functional connectivity matrix and a deep learning architecture (AT-1CBL). Resting-state EEG data from 44 PKD patients and 44 healthy controls (HCs) were collected using a 128-channel EEG system. Functional connectivity matrices were computed and transformed into graph data to examine brain network property differences between PKD patients and controls through graph theory. Source localization was conducted to explore neural circuit differences in patients. The AT-1CBL model, integrating 1D-CNN and Bi-LSTM with attentional mechanisms, achieved a classification accuracy of 93.77% on phase lag index (PLI) features in the Theta band. Graph theoretic analysis revealed significant phase synchronization impairments in the Theta band of the functional brain network in PKD patients, particularly in the distribution of weak connections compared to HCs. Source localization analyses indicated greater differences in functional connectivity in sensorimotor regions and the frontal-limbic system in PKD patients, suggesting abnormalities in motor integration related to clinical symptoms. This study highlights the potential of deep learning models based on EEG functional connectivity for accurate and cost-effective PKD diagnosis, supporting the development of portable EEG devices for clinical monitoring and diagnosis. However, the limited dataset size may affect generalizability, and further exploration of multimodal data integration and advanced deep learning architectures is necessary to enhance the robustness of PKD diagnostic models.

Effects of Emotional Olfactory Stimuli on Modulating Angry Driving Based on an EEG Connectivity Study

Effectively regulating anger driving has become critical in ensuring road safety. The existing research lacks a feasible exploration of anger-driving regulation. This paper delves into the effect and neural mechanisms of emotional olfactory stimuli (EOS) on regulating anger driving based on EEG. First, this study designed an angry driving regulation experiment based on EOS to record EEG signals. Second, brain activation patterns under various EOS conditions are explored by analyzing functional brain networks (FBNs). Additionally, the paper analyzes dynamic alterations in anger-related characteristics to explore the intensity and persistence of regulating anger driving under different EOS. Finally, the paper studies the frequency energy of EEG changes under EOS through time-frequency analysis. The results indicate that EOS can effectively regulate a driver's anger emotions, especially with the banana odor showing superior effects. Under banana odor stimulus, synchronization between the parietal and temporal lobes significantly decreased. Notably, the regulatory effect of banana odor is optimal and exhibits sustained efficacy. The regulatory effect of banana odor on anger emotions is persistent. Furthermore, the impact of banana odor significantly reduces the distribution of high-energy activation states in the parietal lobe region. Our findings provide new insights into the dynamic characterization of functional connectivity during anger-driving regulation and demonstrate the potential of using EOS as a reliable tool for regulating angry driving.

Epileptic Seizure Prediction Using Spatiotemporal Feature Fusion on EEG

Electroencephalography (EEG) plays a crucial role in epilepsy analysis, and epileptic seizure prediction has significant value for clinical treatment of epilepsy. Currently, prediction methods using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) primarily focus on local features of EEG, making it challenging to simultaneously capture the spatial and temporal features from multi-channel EEGs to identify the preictal state effectively. In order to extract inherent spatial relationships among multi-channel EEGs while obtaining their temporal correlations, this study proposed an end-to-end model for the prediction of epileptic seizures by incorporating Graph Attention Network (GAT) and Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN). Low-pass filtered EEG signals were fed into the GAT module for EEG spatial feature extraction, and followed by TCN to capture temporal features, allowing the end-to-end model to acquire the spatiotemporal correlations of multi-channel EEGs. The system was evaluated on the publicly available CHB-MIT database, yielding segment-based accuracy of 98.71%, specificity of 98.35%, sensitivity of 99.07%, and F1-score of 98.71%, respectively. Event-based sensitivity of 97.03% and False Positive Rate (FPR) of 0.03/h was also achieved. Experimental results demonstrated this system can achieve superior performance for seizure prediction by leveraging the fusion of EEG spatiotemporal features without the need of feature engineering.

Spatial-Temporal Dynamic Hypergraph Information Bottleneck for Brain Network Classification

Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained widespread application in automatic brain network classification tasks, owing to their ability to directly capture crucial information in non-Euclidean structures. However, two primary challenges persist in this domain. First, within the realm of clinical neuro-medicine, signals from cerebral regions are inevitably contaminated with noise stemming from physiological or external factors. The construction of brain networks heavily relies on set thresholds and feature information within brain regions, making it susceptible to the incorporation of such noises into the brain topology. Additionally, the static nature of the artificially constructed brain network's adjacent structure restricts real-time changes in brain topology. Second, mainstream GNN-based approaches tend to focus solely on capturing information interactions of nearest neighbor nodes, overlooking high-order topology features. In response to these challenges, we propose an adaptive unsupervised Spatial-Temporal Dynamic Hypergraph Information Bottleneck (ST-DHIB) framework for dynamically optimizing brain networks. Specifically, adopting an information theory perspective, Graph Information Bottleneck (GIB) is employed for purifying graph structure, and dynamically updating the processed input brain signals. From a graph theory standpoint, we utilize the designed Hypergraph Neural Network (HGNN) and Bi-LSTM to capture higher-order spatial-temporal context associations among brain channels. Comprehensive patient-specific and cross-patient experiments have been conducted on two available datasets. The results demonstrate the advancement and generalization of the proposed framework.

Simultaneous EEG-fMRI Investigation of Rhythm-Dependent Thalamo-Cortical Circuits Alteration in Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is accompanied by aberrant interactions of intrinsic brain networks. However, the modulatory effect of electroencephalography (EEG) rhythms on the functional connectivity (FC) in schizophrenia remains unclear. This study aims to provide new insight into network communication in schizophrenia by integrating FC and EEG rhythm information. After collecting simultaneous resting-state EEG-functional magnetic resonance imaging data, the effect of rhythm modulations on FC was explored using what we term "dynamic rhythm information." We also investigated the synergistic relationships among three networks under rhythm modulation conditions, where this relationship presents the coupling between two brain networks with other networks as the center by the rhythm modulation. This study found FC between the thalamus and cortical network regions was rhythm-specific. Further, the effects of the thalamus on the default mode network (DMN) and salience network (SN) were less similar under alpha rhythm modulation in schizophrenia patients than in controls ([Formula: see text]). However, the similarity between the effects of the central executive network (CEN) on the DMN and SN under gamma modulation was greater ([Formula: see text]), and the degree of coupling was negatively correlated with the duration of disease ([Formula: see text], [Formula: see text]). Moreover, schizophrenia patients exhibited less coupling with the thalamus as the center and greater coupling with the CEN as the center. These results indicate that modulations in dynamic rhythms might contribute to the disordered functional interactions seen in schizophrenia.

Multimodal Covariance Network Reflects Individual Cognitive Flexibility

Cognitive flexibility refers to the capacity to shift between patterns of mental function and relies on functional activity supported by anatomical structures. However, how the brain's structural-functional covarying is preconfigured in the resting state to facilitate cognitive flexibility under tasks remains unrevealed. Herein, we investigated the potential relationship between individual cognitive flexibility performance during the trail-making test (TMT) and structural-functional covariation of the large-scale multimodal covariance network (MCN) using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and electroencephalograph (EEG) datasets of 182 healthy participants. Results show that cognitive flexibility correlated significantly with the intra-subnetwork covariation of the visual network (VN) and somatomotor network (SMN) of MCN. Meanwhile, inter-subnetwork interactions across SMN and VN/default mode network/frontoparietal network (FPN), as well as across VN and ventral attention network (VAN)/dorsal attention network (DAN) were also found to be closely related to individual cognitive flexibility. After using resting-state MCN connectivity as representative features to train a multi-layer perceptron prediction model, we achieved a reliable prediction of individual cognitive flexibility performance. Collectively, this work offers new perspectives on the structural-functional coordination of cognitive flexibility and also provides neurobiological markers to predict individual cognitive flexibility.

A Graph-Based Neural Approach to Linear Sum Assignment Problems

Linear assignment problems are well-known combinatorial optimization problems involving domains such as logistics, robotics and telecommunications. In general, obtaining an optimal solution to such problems is computationally infeasible even in small settings, so heuristic algorithms are often used to find near-optimal solutions. In order to attain the right assignment permutation, this study investigates a general-purpose learning strategy that uses a bipartite graph to describe the problem structure and a message passing Graph Neural Network (GNN) model to learn the correct mapping. Comparing the proposed structure with two existing DNN solutions, simulation results show that the proposed approach significantly improves classification accuracy, proving to be very efficient in terms of processing time and memory requirements, due to its inherent parameter sharing capability. Among the many practical uses that require solving allocation problems in everyday scenarios, we decided to apply the proposed approach to address the scheduling of electric smart meters access within an electricity distribution smart grid infrastructure, since near-real-time energy monitoring is a key element of the green transition that has become increasingly important in recent times. The results obtained show that the proposed graph-based solver, although sub-optimal, exhibits the highest scalability, compared with other state-of-the-art heuristic approaches. To foster the reproducibility of the results, we made the code available at https://github.com/aircarlo/GNN_LSAP.

Multi-View Graph Contrastive Learning via Adaptive Channel Optimization for Depression Detection in EEG Signals

Automated detection of depression using Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals has become a promising application in advanced bioinformatics technology. Although current methods have achieved high detection performance, several challenges still need to be addressed: (1) Previous studies do not consider data redundancy when modeling multi-channel EEG signals, resulting in some unrecognized noise channels remaining. (2) Most works focus on the functional connection of EEG signals, ignoring their spatial proximity. The spatial topological structure of EEG signals has not been fully utilized to capture more fine-grained features. (3) Prior depression detection models fail to provide interpretability. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a new model, Multi-view Graph Contrastive Learning via Adaptive Channel Optimization (MGCL-ACO) for depression detection in EEG signals. Specifically, the proposed model first selects the critical channels by maximizing the mutual information between tracks and labels of EEG signals to eliminate data redundancy. Then, the MGCL-ACO model builds two similarity metric views based on functional connectivity and spatial proximity. MGCL-ACO constructs the feature extraction module by graph convolutions and contrastive learning to capture more fine-grained features of different perspectives. Finally, our model provides interpretability by visualizing a brain map related to the significance scores of the selected channels. Extensive experiments have been performed on public datasets, and the results show that our proposed model outperforms the most advanced baselines. Our proposed model not only provides a promising approach for automated depression detection using optimal EEG signals but also has the potential to improve the accuracy and interpretability of depression diagnosis in clinical practice.

Attention-Based Convolutional Recurrent Deep Neural Networks for the Prediction of Response to Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation for Major Depressive Disorder

Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) is proposed as an effective treatment for major depressive disorder (MDD). However, because of the suboptimal treatment outcome of rTMS, the prediction of response to this technique is a crucial task. We developed a deep learning (DL) model to classify responders (R) and non-responders (NR). With this aim, we assessed the pre-treatment EEG signal of 34 MDD patients and extracted effective connectivity (EC) among all electrodes in four frequency bands of EEG signal. Two-dimensional EC maps are put together to create a rich connectivity image and a sequence of these images is fed to the DL model. Then, the DL framework was constructed based on transfer learning (TL) models which are pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNN) named VGG16, Xception, and EfficientNetB0. Then, long short-term memory (LSTM) cells are equipped with an attention mechanism added on top of TL models to fully exploit the spatiotemporal information of EEG signal. Using leave-one subject out cross validation (LOSO CV), Xception-BLSTM-Attention acquired the highest performance with 98.86% of accuracy and 97.73% of specificity. Fusion of these models as an ensemble model based on optimized majority voting gained 99.32% accuracy and 98.34% of specificity. Therefore, the ensemble of TL-LSTM-Attention models can predict accurately the treatment outcome.

Evaluation of Brain Functional Connectivity from Electroencephalographic Signals Under Different Emotional States

The identification of the emotional states corresponding to the four quadrants of the valence/arousal space has been widely analyzed in the scientific literature by means of multiple techniques. Nevertheless, most of these methods were based on the assessment of each brain region separately, without considering the possible interactions among different areas. In order to study these interconnections, this study computes for the first time the functional connectivity metric called cross-sample entropy for the analysis of the brain synchronization in four groups of emotions from electroencephalographic signals. Outcomes reported a strong synchronization in the interconnections among central, parietal and occipital areas, while the interactions between left frontal and temporal structures with the rest of brain regions presented the lowest coordination. These differences were statistically significant for the four groups of emotions. All emotions were simultaneously classified with a 95.43% of accuracy, overcoming the results reported in previous studies. Moreover, the differences between high and low levels of valence and arousal, taking into account the state of the counterpart dimension, also provided notable findings about the degree of synchronization in the brain within different emotional conditions and the possible implications of these outcomes from a psychophysiological point of view.

Quantifying Differences Between Affine and Nonlinear Spatial Normalization of FP-CIT Spect Images

Spatial normalization helps us to compare quantitatively two or more input brain scans. Although using an affine normalization approach preserves the anatomical structures, the neuroimaging field is more common to find works that make use of nonlinear transformations. The main reason is that they facilitate a voxel-wise comparison, not only when studying functional images but also when comparing MRI scans given that they fit better to a reference template. However, the amount of bias introduced by the nonlinear transformations can potentially alter the final outcome of a diagnosis especially when studying functional scans for neurological disorders like Parkinson's Disease. In this context, we have tried to quantify the bias introduced by the affine and the nonlinear spatial registration of FP-CIT SPECT volumes of healthy control subjects and patients with PD. For that purpose, we calculated the deformation fields of each participant and applied these deformation fields to a 3D-grid. As the space between the edges of small cubes comprising the grid change, we can quantify which parts from the brain have been enlarged, compressed or just remain the same. When the nonlinear approach is applied, scans from PD patients show a region near their striatum very similar in shape to that of healthy subjects. This artificially increases the interclass separation between patients with PD and healthy subjects as the local intensity is decreased in the latter region, and leads machine learning systems to biased results due to the artificial information introduced by these deformations.

Classification of Depth of Coma Using Complexity Measures and Nonlinear Features of Electroencephalogram Signals

In recent years, some electrophysiological analysis methods of consciousness have been proposed. Most of these studies are based on visual interpretation or statistical analysis, and there is hardly any work classifying the level of consciousness in a deep coma. In this study, we perform an analysis of electroencephalography complexity measures by quantifying features efficiency in differentiating patients in different consciousness levels. Several measures of complexity have been proposed to quantify the complexity of signals. Our aim is to lay the foundation of a system that will objectively define the level of consciousness by performing a complexity analysis of Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Therefore, a nonlinear analysis of EEG signals obtained with a recording scheme proposed by us from 39 patients with Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) between 3 and 8 was performed. Various entropy values (approximate entropy, permutation entropy, etc.) obtained from different algorithms, Hjorth parameters, Lempel-Ziv complexity and Kolmogorov complexity values were extracted from the signals as features. The features were analyzed statistically and the success of features in classifying different levels of consciousness was measured by various classifiers. Consequently, levels of consciousness in deep coma (GCS between 3 and 8) were classified with an accuracy of 90.3%. To the authors' best knowledge, this is the first demonstration of the discriminative nonlinear features extracted from tactile and auditory stimuli EEG signals in distinguishing different GCSs of comatose patients.

A New Multi-Resolution Approach to EEG Brain Modeling Using Local-Global Graphs and Stochastic Petri-Nets

Recent modeling of brain activities encompasses the fusion of different modalities. However, fusing brain modalities requires not only the efficient and compatible representation of the signals but also the benefits associated with it. For instance, the combination of the functional characteristics of EEGs with the structural features of functional magnetic resonance imaging contributes to a better interpretation localization of brain activities. In this paper, we consider the EEG signals as parallel 2D string images from which we extract their visual abstract representations of EEG features. This representation can benefit not only the EEG modeling of the signals but also a future fusion with another modality, like fMRI. In particular, the new methodology, called Bar-LG, provides a reduced discretization of the EEG signals into selected minima/maxima in order to be used in a form of tokens for EEG brain activities of interest. A formal context-free language is used to express and represent the extracted tokens for the selected active brain regions. Then, a Generalized Stochastic Petri-Nets (GSPN) model is used for expressing the functional associations and interactions of these EEG signals as 2D image regions. An illustrative EEG example of epileptic seizure is presented to show the Bar-LG methodology’s abstract capabilities.

Brain Network Organization Following Post-Stroke Neurorehabilitation

Brain network analysis can offer useful information to guide the rehabilitation of post-stroke patients. We applied functional network connection models based on multiplex-multilayer network analysis (MMN) to explore functional network connectivity changes induced by robot-aided gait training (RAGT) using the Ekso, a wearable exoskeleton, and compared it to conventional overground gait training (COGT) in chronic stroke patients. We extracted the coreness of individual nodes at multiple locations in the brain from EEG recordings obtained before and after gait training in a resting state. We found that patients provided with RAGT achieved a greater motor function recovery than those receiving COGT. This difference in clinical outcome was paralleled by greater changes in connectivity patterns among different brain areas central to motor programming and execution, as well as a recruitment of other areas beyond the sensorimotor cortices and at multiple frequency ranges, contemporarily. The magnitude of these changes correlated with motor function recovery chances. Our data suggest that the use of RAGT as an add-on treatment to COGT may provide post-stroke patients with a greater modification of the functional brain network impairment following a stroke. This might have potential clinical implications if confirmed in large clinical trials.

Effects of Motor Imagery Tasks on Brain Functional Networks Based on EEG Mu/Beta Rhythm

Motor imagery (MI) refers to the mental rehearsal of movement in the absence of overt motor action, which can activate or inhibit cortical excitability. EEG mu/beta oscillations recorded over the human motor cortex have been shown to be consistently suppressed during both the imagination and performance of movements, although the specific effect on brain function remains to be confirmed. In this study, Granger causality (GC) was used to construct the brain functional network of subjects during motor imagery and resting state based on EEG in order to explore the effects of motor imagery on brain function. Parameters of the brain functional network were compared and analyzed, including degree, clustering coefficient, characteristic path length and global efficiency of EEG mu/beta rhythm in different states. The results showed that the clustering coefficient and efficiency of EEG mu/beta rhythm decreased significantly during motor imagery (p < 0.05), while degree distribution and characteristic path length increased significantly (p < 0.05), mainly concentrated in the frontal lobe and sensorimotor area. For the resting state after motor imagery, the changes of brain functional characteristics were roughly similar to those of the task state. Therefore, it is concluded that motor imagery plays an important role in activation of cortical excitability.

A Vector Quantization-Based Spike Compression Approach Dedicated to Multichannel Neural Recording Microsystems

Implantable high-density multichannel neural recording microsystems provide simultaneous recording of brain activities. Wireless transmission of the entire recorded data causes high bandwidth usage, which is not tolerable for implantable applications. As a result, a hardware-friendly compression module is required to reduce the amount of data before it is transmitted. This paper presents a novel compression approach that utilizes a spike extractor and a vector quantization (VQ)-based spike compressor. In this approach, extracted spikes are vector quantized using an unsupervised learning process providing a high spike compression ratio (CR) of 10-80. A combination of extracting and compressing neural spikes results in a significant data reduction as well as preserving the spike waveshapes. The compression performance of the proposed approach was evaluated under variant conditions. We also developed new architectures such that the hardware blocks of our approach can be implemented more efficiently. The compression module was implemented in a 180-nm standard CMOS process achieving a SNDR of 14.49[Formula: see text]dB and a classification accuracy (CA) of 99.62% at a CR of 20, while consuming 4[Formula: see text][Formula: see text]W power and 0.16[Formula: see text]mm² chip area per channel.

Decoding Color Visual Working Memory from EEG Signals Using Graph Convolutional Neural Networks

Color has an important role in object recognition and visual working memory (VWM). Decoding color VWM in the human brain is helpful to understand the mechanism of visual cognitive process and evaluate memory ability. Recently, several studies showed that color could be decoded from scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) signals during the encoding stage of VWM, which process visible information with strong neural coding. Whether color could be decoded from other VWM processing stages, especially the maintaining stage which processes invisible information, is still unknown. Here, we constructed an EEG color graph convolutional network model (ECo-GCN) to decode colors during different VWM stages. Based on graph convolutional networks, ECo-GCN considers the graph structure of EEG signals and may be more efficient in color decoding. We found that (1) decoding accuracies for colors during the encoding, early, and late maintaining stages were 81.58%, 79.36%, and 77.06%, respectively, exceeding those during the pre-stimuli stage (67.34%), and (2) the decoding accuracy during maintaining stage could predict participants' memory performance. The results suggest that EEG signals during the maintaining stage may be more sensitive than behavioral measurement to predict the VWM performance of human, and ECo-GCN provides an effective approach to explore human cognitive function.

Kuramoto Model-Based Analysis Reveals Oxytocin Effects on Brain Network Dynamics

The oxytocin effects on large-scale brain networks such as Default Mode Network (DMN) and Frontoparietal Network (FPN) have been largely studied using fMRI data. However, these studies are mainly based on the statistical correlation or Bayesian causality inference, lacking interpretability at the physical and neuroscience level. Here, we propose a physics-based framework of the Kuramoto model to investigate oxytocin effects on the phase dynamic neural coupling in DMN and FPN. Testing on fMRI data of 59 participants administrated with either oxytocin or placebo, we demonstrate that oxytocin changes the topology of brain communities in DMN and FPN, leading to higher synchronization in the FPN and lower synchronization in the DMN, as well as a higher variance of the coupling strength within the DMN and more flexible coupling patterns at group level. These results together indicate that oxytocin may increase the ability to overcome the corresponding internal oscillation dispersion and support the flexibility in neural synchrony in various social contexts, providing new evidence for explaining the oxytocin modulated social behaviors. Our proposed Kuramoto model-based framework can be a potential tool in network neuroscience and offers physical and neural insights into phase dynamics of the brain.

Spatiotemporal Graph Indicators for Air Traffic Complexity Analysis

There has been extensive research in formalising air traffic complexity, but existing works focus mainly on a metric to tie down the peak air traffic controllers workload rather than a dynamic approach to complexity that could guide both strategical, pre-tactical and tactical actions for a smooth flow of aircraft. In this paper, aircraft interdependencies are formalized using graph theory and four complexity indicators are described, which combine spatiotemporal topological information with the severity of the interdependencies. These indicators can be used to predict the dynamic evolution of complexity, by not giving one single score, but measuring complexity in a time window. Results show that these indicators can capture complex spatiotemporal areas in a sector and give a detailed and nuanced view of sector complexity.

Motor Intention Decoding from the Upper Limb by Graph Convolutional Network Based on Functional Connectivity

Decoding brain intention from noninvasively measured neural signals has recently been a hot topic in brain-computer interface (BCI). The motor commands about the movements of fine parts can increase the degrees of freedom under control and be applied to external equipment without stimulus. In the decoding process, the classifier is one of the key factors, and the graph information of the EEG was ignored by most researchers. In this paper, a graph convolutional network (GCN) based on functional connectivity was proposed to decode the motor intention of four fine parts movements (shoulder, elbow, wrist, hand). First, event-related desynchronization was analyzed to reveal the differences between the four classes. Second, functional connectivity was constructed by using synchronization likelihood (SL), phase-locking value (PLV), H index (H), mutual information (MI), and weighted phase-lag index (WPLI) to acquire the electrode pairs with a difference. Subsequently, a GCN and convolutional neural networks (CNN) were performed based on functional topological structures and time points, respectively. The results demonstrated that the proposed method achieved a decoding accuracy of up to 92.81% in the four-class task. Besides, the combination of GCN and functional connectivity can promote the development of BCI.

Brain Networks Modulation in Young and Old Subjects During Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Applied on Prefrontal and Parietal Cortex

Evidence indicates that the transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has the potential to transiently modulate cognitive function, including age-related changes in brain performance. Only a small number of studies have explored the interaction between the stimulation sites on the scalp, task performance, and brain network connectivity within the frame of physiological aging. We aimed to evaluate the spread of brain activation in both young and older adults in response to anodal tDCS applied to two different scalp stimulation sites: Prefrontal cortex (PFC) and posterior parietal cortex (PPC). EEG data were recorded during tDCS stimulation and evaluated using the Small World (SW) index as a graph theory metric. Before and after tDCS, participants performed a behavioral task; a performance accuracy index was computed and correlated with the SW index. Results showed that the SW index increased during tDCS of the PPC compared to the PFC at higher EEG frequencies only in young participants. tDCS at the PPC site did not exert significant effects on the performance, while tDCS at the PFC site appeared to influence task reaction times in the same direction in both young and older participants. In conclusion, studies using tDCS to modulate functional connectivity and influence behavior can help identify suitable protocols for the aging brain.

Control of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Duration by Assessing Functional Connectivity of Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Signals

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been shown to create neuroplasticity in healthy and diseased populations. The control of stimulation duration by providing real-time brain state feedback using neuroimaging is a topic of great interest. This study presents the feasibility of a closed-loop modulation for the targeted functional network in the prefrontal cortex. We hypothesize that we cannot improve the brain state further after reaching a specific state during a stimulation therapy session. A high-definition tDCS of 1[Formula: see text]mA arranged in a ring configuration was applied at the targeted right prefrontal cortex of 15 healthy male subjects for 10[Formula: see text]min. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy was used to monitor hemoglobin chromophores during the stimulation period continuously. The correlation matrices obtained from filtered oxyhemoglobin were binarized to form subnetworks of short- and long-range connections. The connectivity in all subnetworks was analyzed individually using a new quantification measure of connectivity percentage based on the correlation matrix. The short-range network in the stimulated hemisphere showed increased connectivity in the initial stimulation phase. However, the increase in connection density reduced significantly after 6[Formula: see text]min of stimulation. The short-range network of the left hemisphere and the long-range network gradually increased throughout the stimulation period. The connectivity percentage measure showed a similar response with network theory parameters. The connectivity percentage and network theory metrics represent the brain state during the stimulation therapy. The results from the network theory metrics, including degree centrality, efficiency, and connection density, support our hypothesis and provide a guideline for feedback on the brain state. The proposed neuro-feedback scheme is feasible to control the stimulation duration to avoid overdosage.

A Diagnostic Strategy via Multiresolution Synchrosqueezing Transform on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

This research presents a new method for detecting obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) based on time-frequency analysis of multi-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) signals using the multi-variate synchrosqueezing transform (MSST). With the evolution of multi-channel sensor implementations, the employment of multi-channel techniques for the extraction of features arising from multi-channel dependency and mono-channel characteristics has become common. MSST has recently been proposed as a method for modeling the combined oscillatory mechanisms of multi-channel signals. It makes use of the concepts of instantaneous frequency (IF) and bandwidth. Electrophysiological data, like other nonstationary signals, necessitates both joint time-frequency analysis and independent time and frequency domain studies. The usefulness and effectiveness of a multi-variate, wavelet-based synchrosqueezing algorithm paired with a band extraction method are tested using electroencephalography data obtained from OCD patients and control groups in this research. The proposed methodology yields substantial results when analyzing differences between patient and control groups.

Classification of Autism Spectrum Disorder From EEG-Based Functional Brain Connectivity Analysis

Autism is a psychiatric condition that is typically diagnosed with behavioral assessment methods. Recent years have seen a rise in the number of children with autism. Since this could have serious health and socioeconomic consequences, it is imperative to investigate how to develop strategies for an early diagnosis that might pave the way to an adequate intervention. In this study, the phase-based functional brain connectivity derived from electroencephalogram (EEG) in a machine learning framework was used to classify the children with autism and typical children in an experimentally obtained data set of 12 autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 12 typical children. Specifically, the functional brain connectivity networks have quantitatively been characterized by graph-theoretic parameters computed from three proposed approaches based on a standard phase-locking value, which were used as the features in a machine learning environment. Our study was successfully classified between two groups with approximately 95.8% accuracy, 100% sensitivity, and 92% specificity through the trial-averaged phase-locking value (PLV) approach and cubic support vector machine (SVM). This work has also shown that significant changes in functional brain connectivity in ASD children have been revealed at theta band using the aggregated graph-theoretic features. Therefore, the findings from this study offer insight into the potential use of functional brain connectivity as a tool for classifying ASD children.

Graph Attention Network with Focal Loss for Seizure Detection on Electroencephalography Signals

Automatic seizure detection from electroencephalogram (EEG) plays a vital role in accelerating epilepsy diagnosis. Previous researches on seizure detection mainly focused on extracting time-domain and frequency-domain features from single electrodes, while paying little attention to the positional correlations between different EEG channels of the same subject. Moreover, data imbalance is common in seizure detection scenarios where the duration of nonseizure periods is much longer than the duration of seizures. To cope with the two challenges, a novel seizure detection method based on graph attention network (GAT) is presented. The approach acts on graph-structured data and takes the raw EEG data as input. The positional relationship between different EEG signals is exploited by GAT. The loss function of the GAT model is redefined using the focal loss to tackle data imbalance problem. Experiments are conducted on the CHB-MIT dataset. The accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of the proposed method are 98.89[Formula: see text], 97.10[Formula: see text] and 99.63[Formula: see text], respectively.

Impact of Machine Learning Pipeline Choices in Autism Prediction From Functional Connectivity Data

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a largely prevalent neurodevelopmental condition with a big social and economical impact affecting the entire life of families. There is an intense search for biomarkers that can be assessed as early as possible in order to initiate treatment and preparation of the family to deal with the challenges imposed by the condition. Brain imaging biomarkers have special interest. Specifically, functional connectivity data extracted from resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) should allow to detect brain connectivity alterations. Machine learning pipelines encompass the estimation of the functional connectivity matrix from brain parcellations, feature extraction, and building classification models for ASD prediction. The works reported in the literature are very heterogeneous from the computational and methodological point of view. In this paper, we carry out a comprehensive computational exploration of the impact of the choices involved while building these machine learning pipelines. Specifically, we consider six brain parcellation definitions, five methods for functional connectivity matrix construction, six feature extraction/selection approaches, and nine classifier building algorithms. We report the prediction performance sensitivity to each of these choices, as well as the best results that are comparable with the state of the art.

Acrophobia Quantified by EEG Based on CNN Incorporating Granger Causality

The aim of this study is to quantify acrophobia and provide safety advices for high-altitude workers. Considering that acrophobia is a fuzzy quantity that cannot be accurately evaluated by conventional detection methods, we propose a comprehensive solution to quantify acrophobia. Specifically, this study simulates a virtual reality environment called High-altitude Plank Walking Challenge, which provides a safe and controlled experimental environment for subjects. Besides, a method named Granger Causality Convolutional Neural Network (GCCNN) combining convolutional neural network and Granger causality functional brain network is proposed to analyze the subjects' noninvasive scalp EEG signals. Here, the GCCNN method is used to distinguish the subjects with severe acrophobia, moderate acrophobia, and no acrophobia in a three-class classification task or no acrophobia and acrophobia in a two-class classification task. Compared with the mainstream methods, the GCCNN method achieves better classification performance, with an accuracy of 98.74% for the two-class classification task (no acrophobia versus acrophobia) and of 98.47% for the three-class classification task (no acrophobia versus moderate acrophobia versus severe acrophobia). Consequently, our proposed GCCNN method can provide more accurate quantitative results than the comparative methods, making it to be more competitive in further practical applications.

Hardware architecture for real-time EEG-based functional brain connectivity parameter extraction

In this work, we proposed a novel architecture for real-time quantitative characterization of functional brain connectivity networks derived from Electroencephalogram (EEG). It consists of two main parts - calculation of Phase Lag Index (PLI) to form the functional connectivity networks and the extraction of a set of graph-theoretic parameters to quantitatively characterize these networks. The architecture was developed for a 19-channel EEG system. The system can calculate all the functional connectivity parameters in a total time of 131µs, utilizes 71% logic resources, and shows 51.84 mW dynamic power consumption at 22.16 MHz operation frequency when implemented in a Stratix IV EP4SGX230K FPGA. Our analysis also showed that the system occupies an area equivalent to approximately 937K 2-input NAND gates, with an estimated power consumption of 39.3 mW at 0.9 V supply using a 90 nm CMOS Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) technology.

Synchrony and Complexity in State-Related EEG Networks: An Application of Spectral Graph Theory

The brain may be considered as a synchronized dynamic network with several coherent dynamical units. However, concerns remain whether synchronizability is a stable state in the brain networks. If so, which index can best reveal the synchronizability in brain networks? To answer these questions, we tested the application of the spectral graph theory and the Shannon entropy as alternative approaches in neuroimaging. We specifically tested the alpha rhythm in the resting-state eye closed (rsEC) and the resting-state eye open (rsEO) conditions, a well-studied classical example of synchrony in neuroimaging EEG. Since the synchronizability of alpha rhythm is more stable during the rsEC than the rsEO, we hypothesized that our suggested spectral graph theory indices (as reliable measures to interpret the synchronizability of brain signals) should exhibit higher values in the rsEC than the rsEO condition. We performed two separate analyses of two different datasets (as elementary and confirmatory studies). Based on the results of both studies and in agreement with our hypothesis, the spectral graph indices revealed higher stability of synchronizability in the rsEC condition. The k-mean analysis indicated that the spectral graph indices can distinguish the rsEC and rsEO conditions by considering the synchronizability of brain networks. We also computed correlations among the spectral indices, the Shannon entropy, and the topological indices of brain networks, as well as random networks. Correlation analysis indicated that although the spectral and the topological properties of random networks are completely independent, these features are significantly correlated with each other in brain networks. Furthermore, we found that complexity in the investigated brain networks is inversely related to the stability of synchronizability. In conclusion, we revealed that the spectral graph theory approach can be reliably applied to study the stability of synchronizability of state-related brain networks.

Olfactory EEG Signal Classification Using a Trapezoid Difference-Based Electrode Sequence Hashing Approach

Olfactory-induced electroencephalogram (EEG) signal classification is of great significance in a variety of fields, such as disorder treatment, neuroscience research, multimedia applications and brain-computer interface. In this paper, a trapezoid difference-based electrode sequence hashing method is proposed for olfactory EEG signal classification. First, an N-layer trapezoid feature set whose size ratio of the top, bottom and height is 1:2:1 is constructed for each frequency band of each EEG sample. This construction is based on N optimized power-spectral-density features extracted from N real electrodes and N nonreal electrode's features. Subsequently, the N real electrodes' sequence (ES) codes of each layer of the constructed trapezoid feature set are obtained by arranging the feature values in ascending order. Finally, the nearest neighbor classification is used to find a class whose ES codes are the most similar to those of the testing sample. Thirteen-class olfactory EEG signals collected from 11 subjects are used to compare the classification performance of the proposed method with six traditional classification methods. The comparison shows that the proposed method gives average accuracy of 94.3%, Cohen's kappa value of 0.94, precision of 95.0%, and F1-measure of 94.6%, which are higher than those of the existing methods.

Distinct Patterns of Functional Connectivity During the Comprehension of Natural, Narrative Speech

Recent continuous task studies, such as narrative speech comprehension, show that fluctuations in brain functional connectivity (FC) are altered and enhanced compared to the resting state. Here, we characterized the fluctuations in FC during comprehension of speech and time-reversed speech conditions. The correlations of Hilbert envelope of source-level EEG data were used to quantify FC between spatially separate brain regions. A symmetric multivariate leakage correction was applied to address the signal leakage issue before calculating FC. The dynamic FC was estimated based on a sliding time window. Then, principal component analysis (PCA) was performed on individually concatenated and temporally concatenated FC matrices to identify FC patterns. We observed that the mode of FC induced by speech comprehension can be characterized with a single principal component. The condition-specific FC demonstrated decreased correlations between frontal and parietal brain regions and increased correlations between frontal and temporal brain regions. The fluctuations of the condition-specific FC characterized by a shorter time demonstrated that dynamic FC also exhibited condition specificity over time. The FC is dynamically reorganized and FC dynamic pattern varies along a single mode of variation during speech comprehension. The proposed analysis framework seems valuable for studying the reorganization of brain networks during continuous task experiments.

Multiplex and Multilayer Network EEG Analyses: A Novel Strategy in the Differential Diagnosis of Patients with Chronic Disorders of Consciousness

The deterioration of specific topological network measures that quantify different features of whole-brain functional network organization can be considered a marker for awareness impairment. Such topological measures reflect the functional interactions of multiple brain structures, which support the integration of different sensorimotor information subtending awareness. However, conventional, single-layer, graph theoretical analysis (GTA)-based approaches cannot always reliably differentiate patients with Disorders of Consciousness (DoC). Using multiplex and multilayer network analyses of frequency-specific and area-specific networks, we investigated functional connectivity during resting-state EEG in 17 patients with Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome (UWS) and 15 with Minimally Conscious State (MCS). Multiplex and multilayer network metrics indicated the deterioration and heterogeneity of functional networks and, particularly, the frontal-parietal (FP), as the discriminant between patients with MCS and UWS. These data were not appreciable when considering each individual frequency-specific network. The distinctive properties of multiplex/multilayer network metrics and individual frequency-specific network metrics further suggest the value of integrating the networks as opposed to analyzing frequency-specific network metrics one at a time. The hub vulnerability of these regions was positively correlated with the behavioral responsiveness, thus strengthening the clinically-based differential diagnosis. Therefore, it may be beneficial to adopt both multiplex and multilayer network analyses when expanding the conventional GTA-based analyses in the differential diagnosis of patients with DoC. Multiplex analysis differentiated patients at a group level, whereas the multilayer analysis offered complementary information to differentiate patients with DoC individually. Although further studies are necessary to confirm our preliminary findings, these results contribute to the issue of DoC differential diagnosis and may help in guiding patient-tailored management.

Dynamic Reorganization of the Cortical Functional Brain Network in Affective Processing and Cognitive Reappraisal

Emotion and affect play crucial roles in human life that can be disrupted by diseases. Functional brain networks need to dynamically reorganize within short time periods in order to efficiently process and respond to affective stimuli. Documenting these large-scale spatiotemporal dynamics on the same timescale they arise, however, presents a large technical challenge. In this study, the dynamic reorganization of the cortical functional brain network during an affective processing and emotion regulation task is documented using an advanced multi-model electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technique. Sliding time window correlation and [Formula: see text]-means clustering are employed to explore the functional brain connectivity (FC) dynamics during the unaltered perception of neutral (moderate valence, low arousal) and negative (low valence, high arousal) stimuli and cognitive reappraisal of negative stimuli. Betweenness centralities are computed to identify central hubs within each complex network. Results from 20 healthy subjects indicate that the cortical mechanism for cognitive reappraisal follows a ‘top-down’ pattern that occurs across four brain network states that arise at different time instants (0–170[Formula: see text]ms, 170–370[Formula: see text]ms, 380–620[Formula: see text]ms, and 620–1000[Formula: see text]ms). Specifically, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is identified as a central hub to promote the connectivity structures of various affective states and consequent regulatory efforts. This finding advances our current understanding of the cortical response networks of reappraisal-based emotion regulation by documenting the recruitment process of four functional brain sub-networks, each seemingly associated with different cognitive processes, and reveals the dynamic reorganization of functional brain networks during emotion regulation.

Weighted Brain Network Metrics for Decoding Action Intention Understanding Based on EEG

Background: Understanding the action intentions of others is important for social and human-robot interactions. Recently, many state-of-the-art approaches have been proposed for decoding action intention understanding. Although these methods have some advantages, it is still necessary to design other tools that can more efficiently classify the action intention understanding signals. New Method: Based on EEG, we first applied phase lag index (PLI) and weighted phase lag index (WPLI) to construct functional connectivity matrices in five frequency bands and 63 micro-time windows, then calculated nine graph metrics from these matrices and subsequently used the network metrics as features to classify different brain signals related to action intention understanding. Results: Compared with the single methods (PLI or WPLI), the combination method (PLI+WPLI) demonstrates some overwhelming victories. Most of the average classification accuracies exceed 70%, and some of them approach 80%. In statistical tests of brain network, many significantly different edges appear in the frontal, occipital, parietal, and temporal regions. Conclusions: Weighted brain networks can effectively retain data information. The integrated method proposed in this study is extremely effective for investigating action intention understanding. Both the mirror neuron and mentalizing systems participate as collaborators in the process of action intention understanding.

Dyslexia Diagnosis by EEG Temporal and Spectral Descriptors: An Anomaly Detection Approach

Diagnosis of learning difficulties is a challenging goal. There are huge number of factors involved in the evaluation procedure that present high variance among the population with the same difficulty. Diagnosis is usually performed by scoring subjects according to results obtained in different neuropsychological (performance-based) tests specifically designed to this end. One of the most frequent disorders is developmental dyslexia (DD), a specific difficulty in the acquisition of reading skills not related to mental age or inadequate schooling. Its prevalence is estimated between 5% and 12% of the population. Traditional tests for DD diagnosis aim to measure different behavioral variables involved in the reading process. In this paper, we propose a diagnostic method not based on behavioral variables but on involuntary neurophysiological responses to different auditory stimuli. The experiments performed use electroencephalography (EEG) signals to analyze the temporal behavior and the spectral content of the signal acquired from each electrode to extract relevant (temporal and spectral) features. Moreover, the relationship of the features extracted among electrodes allows to infer a connectivity-like model showing brain areas that process auditory stimuli in a synchronized way. Then an anomaly detection system based on the reconstruction residuals of an autoencoder using these features has been proposed. Hence, classification is performed by the proposed system based on the differences in the resulting connectivity models that have demonstrated to be a useful tool for differential diagnosis of DD as well as a method to step towards gaining a better knowledge of the brain processes involved in DD. The results corroborate that nonspeech stimulus modulated at specific frequencies related to the sampling processes developed in the brain to capture rhymes, syllables and phonemes produces effects in specific frequency bands that differentiate between controls and DD subjects. The proposed method showed relatively high sensitivity above 0.6, and up to 0.9 in some of the experiments.

EEG Connectivity Analysis Using Denoising Autoencoders for the Detection of Dyslexia

The Temporal Sampling Framework (TSF) theorizes that the characteristic phonological difficulties of dyslexia are caused by an atypical oscillatory sampling at one or more temporal rates. The LEEDUCA study conducted a series of Electroencephalography (EEG) experiments on children listening to amplitude modulated (AM) noise with slow-rythmic prosodic (0.5-1[Formula: see text]Hz), syllabic (4-8[Formula: see text]Hz) or the phoneme (12-40[Formula: see text]Hz) rates, aimed at detecting differences in perception of oscillatory sampling that could be associated with dyslexia. The purpose of this work is to check whether these differences exist and how they are related to children's performance in different language and cognitive tasks commonly used to detect dyslexia. To this purpose, temporal and spectral inter-channel EEG connectivity was estimated, and a denoising autoencoder (DAE) was trained to learn a low-dimensional representation of the connectivity matrices. This representation was studied via correlation and classification analysis, which revealed ability in detecting dyslexic subjects with an accuracy higher than 0.8, and balanced accuracy around 0.7. Some features of the DAE representation were significantly correlated ([Formula: see text]) with children's performance in language and cognitive tasks of the phonological hypothesis category such as phonological awareness and rapid symbolic naming, as well as reading efficiency and reading comprehension. Finally, a deeper analysis of the adjacency matrix revealed a reduced bilateral connection between electrodes of the temporal lobe (roughly the primary auditory cortex) in DD subjects, as well as an increased connectivity of the F7 electrode, placed roughly on Broca's area. These results pave the way for a complementary assessment of dyslexia using more objective methodologies such as EEG.

Rhythmic Network Modulation to Thalamocortical Couplings in Epilepsy

Thalamus interacts with cortical areas, generating oscillations characterized by their rhythm and levels of synchrony. However, little is known of what function the rhythmic dynamic may serve in thalamocortical couplings. This work introduced a general approach to investigate the modulatory contribution of rhythmic scalp network to the thalamo-frontal couplings in juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) and frontal lobe epilepsy (FLE). Here, time-varying rhythmic network was constructed using the adapted directed transfer function between EEG electrodes, and then was applied as a modulator in fMRI-based thalamocortical functional couplings. Furthermore, the relationship between corticocortical connectivity and rhythm-dependent thalamocortical coupling was examined. The results revealed thalamocortical couplings modulated by EEG scalp network have frequency-dependent characteristics. Increased thalamus- sensorimotor network (SMN) and thalamus-default mode network (DMN) couplings in JME were strongly modulated by alpha band. These thalamus-SMN couplings demonstrated enhanced association with SMN-related corticocortical connectivity. In addition, altered theta-dependent and beta-dependent thalamus-frontoparietal network (FPN) couplings were found in FLE. The reduced theta-dependent thalamus-FPN couplings were associated with the decreased FPN-related corticocortical connectivity. This study proposed interactive links between the rhythmic modulation and thalamocortical coupling. The crucial role of SMN and FPN in subcortical-cortical circuit may have implications for intervention in generalized and focal epilepsy.

Cortical Asymmetries and Connectivity Patterns in the Valence Dimension of the Emotional Brain

Understanding the neurophysiology of emotions, the neuronal structures involved in processing emotional information and the circuits by which they act, is key to designing applications in the field of affective neuroscience, to advance both new treatments and applications of brain-computer interactions. However, efforts have focused on developing computational models capable of emotion classification instead of on studying the neural substrates involved in the emotional process. In this context, we have carried out a study of cortical asymmetries and functional cortical connectivity based on the electroencephalographic signal of 24 subjects stimulated with videos of positive and negative emotional content to bring some light to the neurobiology behind emotional processes. Our results show opposite interhemispheric asymmetry patterns throughout the cortex for both emotional categories and specific connectivity patterns regarding each of the studied emotional categories. However, in general, the same key areas, such as the right hemisphere and more anterior cortical regions, presented higher levels of activity during the processing of both valence emotional categories. These results suggest a common neural pathway for processing positive and negative emotions, but with different activation patterns. These preliminary results are encouraging for elucidating the neuronal circuits of the emotional valence dimension.

The Impact of Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation on Functional Connectivity in Major Depressive Disorder and Bipolar Disorder Evaluated by Directed Transfer Function and Indices Based on Graph Theory

The objective of this work was to study the impact of repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) on the EEG connectivity evaluated by indices based on graph theory, derived from Directed Transfer Function (DTF), in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) or with bipolar disorder (BD). The results showed the importance of beta and gamma rhythms. The indices density, degree and clustering coefficient increased in MDD responders in beta and gamma bands after rTMS. Interestingly, the density and the degree changed in theta band in both groups of nonresponders (decreased in MDD nonresponders but increased in BD nonresponders). Moreover, both indices of integration (the characteristic path length and the global efficiency) as well as the clustering coefficient increased in BD nonresponders for gamma band. In BD responders, the activity increased in the frontal lobe, mainly in the left hemisphere, while in MDD responders in the central posterior part of brain. The fronto-posterior asymmetry decreased in both groups of responders in delta and beta bands. Changes in inter-hemispheric asymmetry were found only in BD nonresponders in all bands, except gamma band. Comparison between groups showed that the degree increased in delta band independently on disease (BD, MDD). These preliminary results showed that the DTF may be a useful marker allowing for evaluation of effectiveness of the rTMS therapy as well for group differentiation between MDD and BD considering separately groups of responders and nonresponders. However, further investigation should be performed over larger groups of patients to confirmed our findings.

Controllability of Networks of Multiple Coupled Neural Populations: An Analytical Method for Neuromodulation's Feasibility

Neuromodulation plays a vital role in the prevention and treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders. Neuromodulation's feasibility is a long-standing issue because it provides the necessity for neuromodulation to realize the desired purpose. A controllability analysis of neural dynamics is necessary to ensure neuromodulation's feasibility. Here, we present such a theoretical method by using the concept of controllability from the control theory that neuromodulation's feasibility can be studied smoothly. Firstly, networks of multiple coupled neural populations with different topologies are established to mathematically model complicated neural dynamics. Secondly, an analytical method composed of a linearization method, the Kalman controllable rank condition and a controllability index is applied to analyze the controllability of the established network models. Finally, the relationship between network dynamics or topological characteristic parameters and controllability is studied by using the analytical method. The proposed method provides a new idea for the study of neuromodulation's feasibility, and the results are expected to guide us to better modulate neurodynamics by optimizing network dynamics and network topology.

Small World Index in Default Mode Network Predicts Progression from Mild Cognitive Impairment to Dementia

Aim of this study was to explore the EEG functional connectivity in amnesic mild cognitive impairments (MCI) subjects with multidomain impairment in order to characterize the Default Mode Network (DMN) in converted MCI (cMCI), which converted to Alzheimer’s disease (AD), compared to stable MCI (sMCI) subjects. A total of 59 MCI subjects were recruited and divided -after appropriate follow-up- into cMCI or sMCI. They were further divided in MCI with linguistic domain (LD) impairment and in MCI with executive domain (ED) impairment. Small World (SW) index was measured as index of balance between integration and segregation brain processes. SW, computed restricting to nodes of DMN regions for all frequency bands, evaluated how they differ between MCI subgroups assessed through clinical and neuropsychological four-years follow-up. In addition, SW evaluated how this pattern differs between MCI with LD and MCI with ED. Results showed that SW index significantly decreased in gamma band in cMCI compared to sMCI. In cMCI with LD impairment, the SW index significantly decreased in delta band, while in cMCI with ED impairment the SW index decreased in delta and gamma bands and increased in alpha1 band. We propose that the DMN functional alterations in cognitive impairment could reflect an abnormal flow of brain information processing during resting state possibly associated to a status of pre-dementia.

A New Methodology Based on EMD and Nonlinear Measurements for Sudden Cardiac Death Detection

Heart diseases are among the most common death causes in the population. Particularly, sudden cardiac death (SCD) is the cause of 10% of the deaths around the world. For this reason, it is necessary to develop new methodologies that can predict this event in the earliest possible stage. This work presents a novel methodology to predict when a person can develop an SCD episode before it occurs. It is based on the adroit combination of the empirical mode decomposition, nonlinear measurements, such as the Higuchi fractal and permutation entropy, and a neural network. The obtained results show that the proposed methodology is capable of detecting an SCD episode 25 min before it appears with a 94% accuracy. The main benefits of the proposal are: (1) an improved detection time of 25% compared with previously published works, (2) moderate computational complexity since only two features are used, and (3) it uses the raw ECG without any preprocessing stage, unlike recent previous works.