Waking EEG functional connectivity in middle-aged and older adults with obstructive sleep apnea

Objectives: The present study aimed at investigating changes in waking electroencephalography (EEG), most specifically regarding spectral power and functional connectivity, in middle-aged and older adults with OSA. We also explored whether changes in spectral power or functional connectivity are associated with polysomnographic characteristics and/or neuropsychological performance. Methods: 19 OSA subjects (apnea-hypopnea index ≥ 20, age: 63.6 ± 6.4) and 22 controls (apneahypopnea index ≤ 10, age: 63.6 ± 6.7) underwent a full night of in-laboratory polysomnography followed by a waking EEG and a neuropsychological assessment. Waking EEG spectral power and imaginary coherence were compared between groups for all EEG frequency bands and scalp regions. Correlation analyses were performed between selected waking EEG variables, polysomnographic parameters and neuropsychological performance. Results: No group difference was observed for EEG spectral power for any frequency band. Regarding the imaginary coherence, when compared to controls, OSA subjects showed decreased EEG connectivity between frontal and temporal regions in theta and alpha bands as well as increased connectivity between frontal and parietal regions in delta and beta 1 bands. In the OSA group, these changes in connectivity correlated with lower sleep efficiency, lower total sleep time and higher apnea-hypopnea index. No relationship was found with neuropsychological performance. Conclusions: Contrary to spectral power, imaginary coherence was sensitive enough to detect changes in brain function in middle-aged and older subjects with OSA when compared to controls. Whether these changes in cerebral connectivity predict cognitive decline needs to be investigated longitudinally

Acute sleep deprivation induces a local brain transfer information increase in the frontal cortex in a widespread decrease context

Sleep deprivation (SD) has adverse effects on mental and physical health, affecting the cognitive abilities and emotional states. Specifically, cognitive functions and alertness are known to decrease after SD. The aim of this work was to identify the directional information transfer after SD on scalp EEG signals using transfer entropy (TE). Using a robust methodology based on EEG recordings of 18 volunteers deprived from sleep for 36 h, TE and spectral analysis were performed to characterize EEG data acquired every 2 h. Correlation between connectivity measures and subjective somnolence was assessed. In general, TE showed medium-and long-range significant decreases originated at the occipital areas and directed towards different regions, which could be interpreted as the transfer of predictive information from parieto-occipital activity to the rest of the head. Simultaneously, short-range increases were obtained for the frontal areas, following a consistent and robust time course with significant maps after 20 h of sleep deprivation. Changes during sleep deprivation in brain network were measured effectively by TE, which showed increased local connectivity and diminished global integration. TE is an objective measure that could be used as a potential measure of sleep pressure and somnolence with the additional property of directed relationships.Postprint (published version

Acute sleep deprivation induces a local brain transfer information increase in the frontal cortex in a widespread decrease context

Sleep deprivation (SD) has adverse effects on mental and physical health, affecting the cognitive abilities and emotional states. Specifically, cognitive functions and alertness are known to decrease after SD. The aim of this work was to identify the directional information transfer after SD on scalp EEG signals using transfer entropy (TE). Using a robust methodology based on EEG recordings of 18 volunteers deprived from sleep for 36 h, TE and spectral analysis were performed to characterize EEG data acquired every 2 h. Correlation between connectivity measures and subjective somnolence was assessed. In general, TE showed medium-and long-range significant decreases originated at the occipital areas and directed towards different regions, which could be interpreted as the transfer of predictive information from parieto-occipital activity to the rest of the head. Simultaneously, short-range increases were obtained for the frontal areas, following a consistent and robust time course with significant maps after 20 h of sleep deprivation. Changes during sleep deprivation in brain network were measured effectively by TE, which showed increased local connectivity and diminished global integration. TE is an objective measure that could be used as a potential measure of sleep pressure and somnolence with the additional property of directed relationships.Postprint (published version

An efficient emotion classification system using EEG

Emotion classification via Electroencephalography (EEG) is used to find the relationships between EEG signals and human emotions. There are many available channels, which consist of electrodes capturing brainwave activity. Some applications may require a reduced number of channels and frequency bands to shorten the computation time, facilitate human comprehensibility, and develop a practical wearable. In prior research, different sets of channels and frequency bands have been used. In this study, a systematic way of selecting the set of channels and frequency bands has been investigated, and results shown that by using the reduced number of channels and frequency bands, it can achieve similar accuracies. The study also proposed a method used to select the appropriate features using the Relief F method. The experimental results of this study showed that the method could reduce and select appropriate features confidently and efficiently. Moreover, the Fuzzy Support Vector Machine (FSVM) is used to improve emotion classification accuracy, as it was found from this research that it performed better than the Support Vector Machine (SVM) in handling the outliers, which are typically presented in the EEG signals. Furthermore, the FSVM is treated as a black-box model, but some applications may need to provide comprehensible human rules. Therefore, the rules are extracted using the Classification and Regression Trees (CART) approach to provide human comprehensibility to the system. The FSVM and rule extraction experiments showed that The FSVM performed better than the SVM in classifying the emotion of interest used in the experiments, and rule extraction from the FSVM utilizing the CART (FSVM-CART) had a good trade-off between classification accuracy and human comprehensibility

Topological Changes in the Functional Brain Networks Induced by Isometric Force Exertions Using a Graph Theoretical Approach: An EEG-based Neuroergonomics Study

Neuroergonomics, the application of neuroscience to human factors and ergonomics, is an emerging science focusing on the human brain concerning performance at work and in everyday settings. The advent of portable neurophysiological methods, including electroencephalography (EEG), has enabled measurements of real-time brain activity during physical tasks without restricting body movements. However, the EEG signatures of different physical exertion activity levels that involve the musculoskeletal system in everyday settings remain poorly understood. Furthermore, the assessment of functional connectivity among different brain regions during different force exertion levels remains unclear. One approach to investigating the brain connectome is to model the underlying mechanism of the brain as a complex network. This study applied employed a graph-theoretical approach to characterize the topological properties of the functional brain network induced by predefined force exertion levels, namely extremely light (EL), light (L), somewhat hard (SWH), hard (H), and extremely hard (EH) in two frequency bands, i.e., alpha and beta. Twelve female participants performed an isometric force exertion task and rated their perception of physical comfort at different physical exertion levels. A CGX-Mobile-64 EEG was used for recording spontaneous brain electrical activity. After preprocessing the EEG data, a source localization method was applied to study the functional brain connectivity at the source level. Subsequently, the alpha and beta networks were constructed by calculating the coherence between all pairs of 84 brain regions of interests that were selected using Brodmann Areas. Graph -theoretical measures were then employed to quantify the topological properties of the functional brain networks at different levels of force exertions at each frequency band. During an \u27extremely hard\u27 exertion level, a small-world network was observed for the alpha coherence network, whereas an ordered network was observed for the beta coherence network. The results suggest that high-level force exertions are associated with brain networks characterized by a more significant clustering coefficient, more global and local efficiency, and shorter characteristic path length under alpha coherence. The above suggests that brain regions are communicating and cooperating to a more considerable degree when the muscle force exertions increase to meet physically challenging tasks. The exploration of the present study extends the current understanding of the neurophysiological basis of physical efforts with different force levels of human physical exertion to reduce work-related musculoskeletal disorders