Data-driven retrieval of population-level EEG features and their role in neurodegenerative diseases

Electrophysiologic disturbances due to neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and Lewy Body disease are detectable by scalp EEG and can serve as a functional measure of disease severity. Traditional quantitative methods of EEG analysis often require an a-priori selection of clinically meaningful EEG features and are susceptible to bias, limiting the clinical utility of routine EEGs in the diagnosis and management of neurodegenerative disorders. We present a data-driven tensor decomposition approach to extract the top 6 spectral and spatial features representing commonly known sources of EEG activity during eyes-closed wakefulness. As part of their neurologic evaluation at Mayo Clinic, 11 001 patients underwent 12 176 routine, standard 10-20 scalp EEG studies. From these raw EEGs, we developed an algorithm based on posterior alpha activity and eye movement to automatically select awake-eyes-closed epochs and estimated average spectral power density (SPD) between 1 and 45 Hz for each channel. We then created a three-dimensional (3D) tensor (record × channel × frequency) and applied a canonical polyadic decomposition to extract the top six factors. We further identified an independent cohort of patients meeting consensus criteria for mild cognitive impairment (30) or dementia (39) due to Alzheimer's disease and dementia with Lewy Bodies (31) and similarly aged cognitively normal controls (36). We evaluated the ability of the six factors in differentiating these subgroups using a Naïve Bayes classification approach and assessed for linear associations between factor loadings and Kokmen short test of mental status scores, fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) PET uptake ratios and CSF Alzheimer's Disease biomarker measures. Factors represented biologically meaningful brain activities including posterior alpha rhythm, anterior delta/theta rhythms and centroparietal beta, which correlated with patient age and EEG dysrhythmia grade. These factors were also able to distinguish patients from controls with a moderate to high degree of accuracy (Area Under the Curve (AUC) 0.59-0.91) and Alzheimer's disease dementia from dementia with Lewy Bodies (AUC 0.61). Furthermore, relevant EEG features correlated with cognitive test performance, PET metabolism and CSF AB42 measures in the Alzheimer's subgroup. This study demonstrates that data-driven approaches can extract biologically meaningful features from population-level clinical EEGs without artefact rejection or a-priori selection of channels or frequency bands. With continued development, such data-driven methods may improve the clinical utility of EEG in memory care by assisting in early identification of mild cognitive impairment and differentiating between different neurodegenerative causes of cognitive impairment.

Multiplex dynamic networks in the newborn brain disclose latent links with neurobehavioral phenotypes

The higher brain functions arise from coordinated neural activity between distinct brain regions, but the spatial, temporal, and spectral complexity of these functional connectivity networks (FCNs) has challenged the identification of correlates with neurobehavioral phenotypes. Characterizing behavioral correlates of early life FCNs is important to understand the activity dependent emergence of neurodevelopmental performance and for improving health outcomes. Here, we develop an analysis pipeline for identifying multiplex dynamic FCNs that combine spectral and spatiotemporal characteristics of the newborn cortical activity. This data-driven approach automatically uncovers latent networks that show robust neurobehavioral correlations and consistent effects by in utero drug exposure. Altogether, the proposed pipeline provides a robust end-to-end solution for an objective assessment and quantitation of neurobehaviorally meaningful network constellations in the highly dynamic cortical functions.

Temporal segmentation of EEG based on functional connectivity network structure

In the study of brain functional connectivity networks, it is assumed that a network is built from a data window in which activity is stationary. However, brain activity is non-stationary over sufficiently large time periods. Addressing the analysis electroencephalograph (EEG) data, we propose a data segmentation method based on functional connectivity network structure. The goal of segmentation is to ensure that within a window of analysis, there is similar network structure. We designed an intuitive and flexible graph distance measure to quantify the difference in network structure between two analysis windows. This measure is modular: a variety of node importance indices can be plugged into it. We use a reference window versus sliding window comparison approach to detect changes, as indicated by outliers in the distribution of graph distance values. Performance of our segmentation method was tested in simulated EEG data and real EEG data from a drone piloting experiment (using correlation or phase-locking value as the functional connectivity strength metric). We compared our method under various node importance measures and against matrix-based dissimilarity metrics that use singular value decomposition on the connectivity matrix. The results show the graph distance approach worked better than matrix-based approaches; graph distance based on partial node centrality was most sensitive to network structural changes, especially when connectivity matrix values change little. The proposed method provides EEG data segmentation tailored for detecting changes in terms of functional connectivity networks. Our study provides a new perspective on EEG segmentation, one that is based on functional connectivity network structure differences.

Measuring multivariate phase synchronization with symbolization and permutation

Phase synchronization is an important mechanism for the information processing of neurons in the brain. Most of the current phase synchronization measures are bivariate and focus on the synchronization between pairs of time series. However, these methods do not provide a full picture of global interactions in neural systems. Considering the prevalence and importance of multivariate neural signal analysis, there is an urgent need to quantify global phase synchronization (GPS) in neural networks. Therefore, we propose a new measure named symbolic phase difference and permutation entropy (SPDPE), which symbolizes the phase difference in multivariate neural signals and estimates GPS according to the permutation patterns of the symbolic sequences. The performance of SPDPE was evaluated using simulated data generated by Kuramoto and Rössler model. The results demonstrate that SPDPE exhibits low sensitivity to data length and outperforms existing methods in accurately characterizing GPS and effectively resisting noise. Moreover, to validate the method with real data, it was applied to classify seizures and non-seizures by calculating the GPS of stereoelectroencephalography (SEEG) data recorded from the onset zones of ten epilepsy patients. We believe that SPDPE will improve the estimation of GPS in many applications, such as EEG-based brain-computer interfaces, brain modeling, and simultaneous EEG-fMRI analysis.

Exploring Oscillatory Dysconnectivity Networks in Major Depression during Resting State Using Coupled Tensor Decomposition

Dysconnectivity of large-scale brain networks has been linked to major depression disorder (MDD) during resting state. Recent researches show that the temporal evolution of brain networks regulated by oscillations reveals novel mechanisms and neural characteristics of MDD. Our study applied a novel coupled tensor decomposition model to investigate the dysconnectivity networks characterized by spatio-temporal-spectral modes of covariation in MDD using resting electroencephalography. The phase lag index is used to calculate the functional connectivity within each time window at each frequency bin. Then, two adjacency tensors with the dimension of time frequency connectivity subject are constructed for the healthy group and the major depression group. We assume that the two groups share the same features for group similarity and retain individual characteristics for group differences. Considering that the constructed tensors are nonnegative and the components in spectral and adjacency modes are partially consistent among the two groups, we formulate a double-coupled nonnegative tensor decomposition model. To reduce computational complexity, we introduce the lowrank approximation. Then, the fast hierarchical alternative least squares algorithm is applied for model optimization. After clustering analysis, we summarize four oscillatory networks characterizing the healthy group and four oscillatory networks characterizing the major depression group, respectively. The proposed model may reveal novel mechanisms of pathoconnectomics in MDD during rest, and it can be easily extended to other psychiatric disorders.

Multi-Paradigm fMRI Fusion via Sparse Tensor Decomposition in Brain Functional Connectivity Study

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a powerful technique with the potential to estimate individual variations in behavioral and cognitive traits. Joint learning of multiple datasets can utilize their complementary information so as to improve learning performance, but it also gives rise to the challenge for data fusion to effectively integrate brain patterns elicited by multiple fMRI data. However, most of the current data fusion methods analyze each single dataset separately and further infer the relationship among them, which fail to utilize the multidimensional structure inherent across modalities and may ignore complex but important interactions. To address this issue, we propose a novel sparse tensor decomposition method to integrate multiple task-stimulus (paradigm) fMRI data. Seeing each paradigm fMRI as one modality, our proposed method considers the relationships across subjects and modalities simultaneously. In specific, a third-order tensor is first modeled by using the functional network connectivity (FNC) of subjects in multiple fMRI paradigms. A novel sparse tensor decomposition with the regularization terms is designed to factorize the tensor into a series of rank-one components, which can extract the shared components across modalities as the embedded features. The L2,1-norm regularizer (i.e., group sparsity) is enforced to select a few common features among multiple subjects. Validation of the proposed method is performed on realistic three paradigm fMRI datasets from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC) study, for the study of the relationship between the FNC and human cognitive abilities. Experimental results show our method outperforms several other competing methods in the prediction of individuals with different cognitive behaviors via the wide range achievement test (WRAT). Furthermore, our method discovers the FNC related to the cognitive behaviors, such as the connectivity associated with the default mode network (DMN) for three paradigms, and the connectivity between DMN and visual (VIS) domains within the emotion task.

Semi-automatic Extraction of Functional Dynamic Networks Describing Patient's Epileptic Seizures

Intracranial electroencephalography (EEG) studies using stereotactic EEG (SEEG) have shown that during seizures, epileptic activity spreads across several anatomical regions from the seizure onset zone toward remote brain areas. A full and objective characterization of this patient-specific time-varying network is crucial for optimal surgical treatment. Functional connectivity (FC) analysis of SEEG signals recorded during seizures enables to describe the statistical relations between all pairs of recorded signals. However, extracting meaningful information from those large datasets is time consuming and requires high expertise. In the present study, we first propose a novel method named Brain-wide Time-varying Network Decomposition (BTND) to characterize the dynamic epileptogenic networks activated during seizures in individual patients recorded with SEEG electrodes. The method provides a number of pathological FC subgraphs with their temporal course of activation. The method can be applied to several seizures of the patient to extract reproducible subgraphs. Second, we compare the activated subgraphs obtained by the BTND method with visual interpretation of SEEG signals recorded in 27 seizures from nine different patients. As a whole, we found that activated subgraphs corresponded to brain regions involved during the course of the seizures and their time course was highly consistent with classical visual interpretation. We believe that the proposed method can complement the visual analysis of SEEG signals recorded during seizures by highlighting and characterizing the most significant parts of epileptic networks with their activation dynamics.

EEG source-space synchrostate transitions and Markov modeling in the math-gifted brain during a long-chain reasoning task

To reveal transition dynamics of global neuronal networks of math-gifted adolescents in handling long-chain reasoning, this study explores momentary phase-synchronized patterns, that is, electroencephalogram (EEG) synchrostates, of intracerebral sources sustained in successive 50 ms time windows during a reasoning task and non-task idle process. Through agglomerative hierarchical clustering for functional connectivity graphs and nested iterative cosine similarity tests, this study identifies seven general and one reasoning-specific prototypical functional connectivity patterns from all synchrostates. Markov modeling is performed for the time-sequential synchrostates of each trial to characterize the interstate transitions. The analysis reveals that default mode network, central executive network (CEN), dorsal attention network, cingulo-opercular network, left/right ventral frontoparietal network, and ventral visual network aperiodically recur over non-task or reasoning process, exhibiting high predictability in interactively reachable transitions. Compared to non-gifted subjects, math-gifted adolescents show higher fractional occupancy and mean duration in CEN and reasoning-triggered transient right frontotemporal network (rFTN) in the time course of the reasoning process. Statistical modeling of Markov chains reveals that there are more self-loops in CEN and rFTN of the math-gifted brain, suggesting robust state durability in temporally maintaining the topological structures. Besides, math-gifted subjects show higher probabilities in switching from the other types of synchrostates to CEN and rFTN, which represents more adaptive reconfiguration of connectivity pattern in the large-scale cortical network for focused task-related information processing, which underlies superior executive functions in controlling goal-directed persistence and high predictability of implementing imagination and creative thinking during long-chain reasoning.

Non-stationary Group-Level Connectivity Analysis for Enhanced Interpretability of Oddball Tasks

Neural responses of oddball tasks can be used as a physiological biomarker to evaluate the brain potential of information processing under the assumption that the differential contribution of deviant stimuli can be assessed accurately. Nevertheless, the non-stationarity of neural activity causes the brain networks to fluctuate hugely in time, deteriorating the estimation of pairwise synergies. To deal with the time variability of neural responses, we have developed a piecewise multi-subject analysis that is applied over a set of time intervals within the stationary assumption holds. To segment the whole stimulus-locked epoch into multiple temporal windows, we experimented with two approaches for piecewise segmentation of EEG recordings: a fixed time-window, at which the estimates of FC measures fulfill a given confidence level, and variable time-window, which is segmented at the change points of the time-varying classifier performance. Employing the weighted Phase Lock Index as a functional connectivity metric, we have presented the validation in a real-world EEG data, proving the effectiveness of variable time segmentation for connectivity extraction when combined with a supervised thresholding approach. Consequently, we performed a piecewise group-level analysis of electroencephalographic data that deals with non-stationary functional connectivity measures, evaluating more carefully the contribution of a link node-set in discriminating between the labeled oddball responses.

Dynamic Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Connectivity Tensor Decomposition: A New Approach to Analyze and Interpret Dynamic Brain Connectivity

There is a growing interest in using so-called dynamic functional connectivity, as the conventional static brain connectivity models are being questioned. Brain network analyses yield complex network data that are difficult to analyze and interpret. To deal with the complex structures, decomposition/factorization techniques that simplify the data are often used. For dynamic network analyses, data simplification is of even greater importance, as dynamic connectivity analyses result in a time series of complex networks. A new challenge that must be faced when using these decomposition/factorization techniques is how to interpret the resulting connectivity patterns. Connectivity patterns resulting from decomposition analyses are often visualized as networks in brain space, in the same way that pairwise correlation networks are visualized. This elevates the risk of conflating connections between nodes that represent correlations between nodes' time series with connections between nodes that result from decomposition analyses. Moreover, dynamic connectivity data may be represented with three-dimensional or four-dimensional (4D) tensors and decomposition results require unique interpretations. Thus, the primary goal of this article is to (1) address the issues that must be considered when interpreting the connectivity patterns from decomposition techniques and (2) show how the data structure and decomposition method interact to affect this interpretation. The outcome of our analyses is summarized as follows. (1) The edge strength in decomposition connectivity patterns represents complex relationships not pairwise interactions between the nodes. (2) The structure of the data significantly alters the connectivity patterns, for example, 4D data result in connectivity patterns with higher regional connections. (3) Orthogonal decomposition methods outperform in feature reduction applications, whereas nonorthogonal decomposition methods are better for mechanistic interpretation.

Exploiting the heightened phase synchrony in patients with neuromuscular disease for the establishment of efficient motor imagery BCIs

Background

Phase synchrony has extensively been studied for understanding neural coordination in health and disease. There are a few studies concerning the implications in the context of BCIs, but its potential for establishing a communication channel in patients suffering from neuromuscular disorders remains totally unexplored. We investigate, here, this possibility by estimating the time-resolved phase connectivity patterns induced during a motor imagery (MI) task and adopting a supervised learning scheme to recover the subject’s intention from the streaming data.

Methods

Electroencephalographic activity from six patients suffering from neuromuscular disease (NMD) and six healthy individuals was recorded during two randomly alternating, externally cued, MI tasks (clenching either left or right fist) and a rest condition. The metric of Phase locking value (PLV) was used to describe the functional coupling between all recording sites. The functional connectivity patterns and the associate network organization was first compared between the two cohorts. Next, working at the level of individual patients, we trained support vector machines (SVMs) to discriminate between “left” and “right” based on different instantiations of connectivity patterns (depending on the encountered brain rhythm and the temporal interval). Finally, we designed and realized a novel brain decoding scheme that could interpret the intention from streaming connectivity patterns, based on an ensemble of SVMs.

Results

The group-level analysis revealed increased phase synchrony and richer network organization in patients. This trend was also seen in the performance of the employed classifiers. Time-resolved connectivity led to superior performance, with distinct SVMs acting as local experts, specialized in the patterning emerged within specific temporal windows (defined with respect to the external trigger). This empirical finding was further exploited in implementing a decoding scheme that can be activated without the need of the precise timing of a trigger.

Conclusion

The increased phase synchrony in NMD patients can turn to a valuable tool for MI decoding. Considering the fast implementation for the PLV pattern computation in multichannel signals, we can envision the development of efficient personalized BCI systems in assistance of these patients.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (10.1186/s12984-018-0431-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Source-Informed Segmentation: A Data-Driven Approach for the Temporal Segmentation of EEG

GOAL

Understanding the dynamics of brain function through non-invasive monitoring techniques requires the development of computational methods that can deal with the non-stationary properties of recorded activities. As a solution to this problem, a new data-driven segmentation method for recordings obtained through electroencephalography (EEG) is presented.

METHODS

The proposed method utilizes singular value decomposition (SVD) to identify the time intervals in the EEG recordings during which the spatial distribution of clusters of active cortical neurons remains quasi-stationary. Theoretical analysis shows that the spatial locality features of these clusters can be, asymptotically, captured by the most significant left singular subspace of the EEG data. A reference/sliding window approach is employed to dynamically extract this feature subspace, and the running projection error is monitored for significant changes using Kolmogorov-Smirnov test.

RESULTS

Simulation results, for a wide range of possible scenarios regarding the spatial distribution of active cortical neurons, show that the algorithm is successful in accurately detecting the segmental structure of the simulated EEG data. The algorithm is also applied to experimental EEG recordings of a modified visual oddball task. Results identify a unique sequence of dynamic patterns in the event-related potential (ERP) response to each of the three involved stimuli.

CONCLUSION

The proposed method, without using source localization methods or scalp topographical maps, is able to identify intervals of quasi-stationarity in the EEG recordings.

SIGNIFICANCE

The proposed segmentation technique can offer new insights on the dynamics of functional organization of the brain in action.

Frequency-specific age-related decreased brain network diversity in cognitively healthy elderly: A whole-brain data-driven analysis

Age-related changes in functional brain network have been well documented. However, recent studies have suggested the nonstationary properties of the functional connectivity of the brain, and little is known about the changes of functional connectivity dynamics during aging. In this study, a two-step singular value decomposition was introduced to capture the dynamic patterns of the time-varying functional connectivity in different frequency intervals, and the whole-brain and regional brain diversity were quantified by using Shannon entropy. The relationships between age and functional connectivity dynamics were investigated in a relatively large sample cohort of cognitively healthy elderly (N = 188, ages 65-80). The results showed an age-related decreased diversity in the whole brain as well as in the right inferior frontal gyrus, right amygdala, right hippocampus, left parahippocampal, and left inferior parietal gyrus in the frequency interval of 0.06-0.12 Hz. In addition, the whole-brain diversity during resting state could also reflect the general mental flexibility. This study provided the first evidence of frequency-specific age effects on the functional connectivity dynamics in cognitively healthy elderly, and may shed new light on the dynamic functional connectivity analysis of aging and neurodegenerative diseases.

Tensor Based Temporal and Multilayer Community Detection for Studying Brain Dynamics During Resting State fMRI

OBJECTIVE

In recent years, resting state fMRI has been widely utilized to understand the functional organization of the brain for healthy and disease populations. Recent studies show that functional connectivity during resting state is a dynamic process. Studying this temporal dynamics provides a better understanding of the human brain compared to static network analysis.

METHODS

In this paper, a new tensor based temporal and multi-layer community detection algorithm is introduced to identify and track the brain network community structure across time and subjects. The framework studies the temporal evolution of communities in fMRI connectivity networks constructed across different regions of interests. The proposed approach relies on determining the subspace that best describes the community structure using Tucker decomposition of the tensor.

RESULTS

The brain dynamics are summarized into a set of functional connectivity states that are repeated over time and subjects. The dynamic behavior of the brain is evaluated in terms of consistency of different subnetworks during resting state. The results illustrate that some of the networks, such as the default mode, cognitive control and bilateral limbic networks, have low consistency over time indicating their dynamic behavior.

CONCLUSION

The results indicate that the functional connectivity of the brain is dynamic and the detected community structure experiences smooth temporal evolution.

SIGNIFICANCE

The work in this paper provides evidence for temporal brain dynamics during resting state through dynamic multi-layer community detection which enables us to better understand the behavior of different subnetworks.

Utilizing time-frequency amplitude and phase synchrony measure to assess feedback processing in a gambling task

The neurophysiological mechanisms involved in the evaluation of performance feedback have been widely studied in the ERP literature over the past twenty years, but understanding has been limited by the use of traditional time-domain amplitude analytic approaches. Gambling outcome valence has been identified as an important factor modulating event-related potential (ERP) components, most notably the feedback negativity (FN). Recent work employing time-frequency analysis has shown that processes indexed by the FN are confounded in the time-domain and can be better represented as separable feedback-related processes in the theta (3-7 Hz) and delta (0-3 Hz) frequency bands. In addition to time-frequency amplitude analysis, phase synchrony measures have begun to further our understanding of performance evaluation by revealing how feedback information is processed within and between various brain regions. The current study aimed to provide an integrative assessment of time-frequency amplitude, inter-trial phase synchrony, and inter-channel phase synchrony changes following monetary feedback in a gambling task. Results revealed that time-frequency amplitude activity explained separable loss and gain processes confounded in the time-domain. Furthermore, phase synchrony measures explained unique variance above and beyond amplitude measures and demonstrated enhanced functional integration between medial prefrontal and bilateral frontal, motor, and occipital regions for loss relative to gain feedback. These findings demonstrate the utility of assessing time-frequency amplitude, inter-trial phase synchrony, and inter-channel phase synchrony together to better elucidate the neurophysiology of feedback processing.