Measuring the Coupling Direction between Neural Oscillations with Weighted Symbolic Transfer Entropy

Study on characteristic of epileptic multi-electroencephalograph base on Hilbert-Huang transform and brain network dynamics

Lots of studies have been carried out on characteristic of epileptic Electroencephalograph (EEG). However, traditional EEG characteristic research methods lack exploration of spatial information. To study the characteristics of epileptic EEG signals from the perspective of the whole brain，this paper proposed combination methods of multi-channel characteristics from time-frequency and spatial domains. This paper was from two aspects: Firstly, signals were converted into 2D Hilbert Spectrum (HS) images which reflected the time-frequency characteristics by Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT). These images were identified by Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model whose sensitivity was 99.8%, accuracy was 98.7%, specificity was 97.4%, F1-score was 98.7%, and AUC-ROC was 99.9%. Secondly, the multi-channel signals were converted into brain networks which reflected the spatial characteristics by Symbolic Transfer Entropy (STE) among different channels EEG. And the results show that there are different network properties between ictal and interictal phase and the signals during the ictal enter the synchronization state more quickly, which was verified by Kuramoto model. To summarize, our results show that there was different characteristics among channels for the ictal and interictal phase, which can provide effective physical non-invasive indicators for the identification and prediction of epileptic seizures.

[Research progress and application of transfer entropy algorithm]

In recent years, exploring the physiological and pathological mechanisms of brain functional integration from the neural network level has become one of the focuses of neuroscience research. Due to the non-stationary and nonlinear characteristics of neural signals, its linear characteristics are not sufficient to fully explain the potential neurophysiological activity mechanism in the implementation of complex brain functions. In order to overcome the limitation that the linear algorithm cannot effectively analyze the nonlinear characteristics of signals, researchers proposed the transfer entropy (TE) algorithm. In recent years, with the introduction of the concept of brain functional network, TE has been continuously optimized as a powerful tool for nonlinear time series multivariate analysis. This paper first introduces the principle of TE algorithm and the research progress of related improved algorithms, discusses and compares their respective characteristics, and then summarizes the application of TE algorithm in the field of electrophysiological signal analysis. Finally, combined with the research progress in recent years, the existing problems of TE are discussed, and the future development direction is prospected.

Estimating Phase Amplitude Coupling between Neural Oscillations Based on Permutation and Entropy

Cross-frequency phase-amplitude coupling (PAC) plays an important role in neuronal oscillations network, reflecting the interaction between the phase of low-frequency oscillation (LFO) and amplitude of the high-frequency oscillations (HFO). Thus, we applied four methods based on permutation analysis to measure PAC, including multiscale permutation mutual information (MPMI), permutation conditional mutual information (PCMI), symbolic joint entropy (SJE), and weighted-permutation mutual information (WPMI). To verify the ability of these four algorithms, a performance test including the effects of coupling strength, signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), and data length was evaluated by using simulation data. It was shown that the performance of SJE was similar to that of other approaches when measuring PAC strength, but the computational efficiency of SJE was the highest among all these four methods. Moreover, SJE can also accurately identify the PAC frequency range under the interference of spike noise. All in all, the results demonstrate that SJE is better for evaluating PAC between neural oscillations.