1 research outputs found
EEG OSCILLATORY ACTIVITIES FROM HUMAN MOTOR BRAIN
Motor skills are essential in people’s daily life in exploring and interacting with
the ambient environment. Impairments to motor functions affect the acquisition of
motor skills, which not only reduce the quality of life, but also impose heavy economic
burdens to sufferers and their families. Oscillatory activities in electroencephalography
(EEG), such as the mu rhythm, present functional correlation to motor functions, which
provide accessible windows to understand underlying neural mechanism in healthy
persons and perform diagnoses in patients with various motor impairments. It is thus of
significant importance to further investigate classic and/or identify new motor-related
EEG oscillatory activities.
In this dissertation, EEG oscillations from both infants and adults are
investigated to uncover motor-related neural information noninvasively from the human
brain regarding their developmental changes and movement representations of body
parts, respectively. In typical developing infants at 5-7 months of age, knowledge about
mu rhythm development is expanded by capturing subtle developmental changes of its
characteristics in a fine age resolution, through the development of new spatio-spectral
analysis of EEG data recorded longitudinally on a weekly basis. In adults, motor tasks
involving fine body parts are studied to investigate EEG resolutions in decoding
movements/motor imageries of individual fingers, which have only been addressed in
large body parts in literature. Discriminative information in EEG oscillations about
motor tasks of fine body parts is revealed through the discovery of a novel type of
spectral structures in EEG, which exhibits better sensitivity to movements of fine body
parts than the classic mu rhythm. The findings in this dissertation broaden the scope of
neural information in EEG oscillations in relation to motor functions, and contribute to
the understanding about human motor functions at various life stages. These results and
technologies are promising to be translated to patient studies in the future