Rui Cao

The detection of epileptic seizure signals based on fuzzy entropy.

BACKGROUND Entropy is a nonlinear index that can reflect the degree of chaos within a system. It is often used to analyze epileptic electroencephalograms (EEG) to detect whether there is an epileptic attack. Much research into the state inspection of epileptic seizures has been conducted based on sample entropy (SampEn). However, the study of epileptic seizures based on fuzzy entropy (FuzzyEn) has lagged behind. NEW METHODS We propose a method of state inspection of epileptic seizures based on FuzzyEn. The method first calculates the FuzzyEn of EEG signals from different epileptic states, and then feature selection is conducted to obtain classification features. Finally, we use the acquired classification features and a grid optimization method to train support vector machines (SVM). RESULTS The results of two open-EEG datasets in epileptics show that there are major differences between seizure attacks and non-seizure attacks, such that FuzzyEn can be used to detect epilepsy, and our method obtains better classification performance (accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of classification of the CHB-MIT are 98.31%, 98.27% and 98.36%, and of the Bonn are 100%, 100%, 100%, respectively). COMPARISONS WITH EXISTING METHOD(S) To verify the performance of the proposed method, a comparison of the classification performance for epileptic seizures using FuzzyEn and SampEn is conducted. Our method obtains better classification performance, which is superior to the SampEn-based methods currently in use. CONCLUSIONS The results indicate that FuzzyEn is a better index for detecting epileptic seizures effectively. The FuzzyEn-based method is preferable, exhibiting potential desirable applications for medical treatment.

An abnormal resting-state functional brain network indicates progression towards Alzheimer's disease

Brain structure and cognitive function change in the temporal lobe, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex of patients with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimers disease, and brain network-connection strength, network efficiency, and nodal attributes are abnormal. However, existing research has only analyzed the differences between these patients and normal controls. In this study, we constructed brain networks using resting-state functional MRI data that was extracted from four populations (normal controls, patients with early mild cognitive impairment, patients with late mild cognitive impairment, and patients with Alzheimers disease) using the Alzheimers Disease Neuroimaging Initiative data set. The aim was to analyze the characteristics of resting-state functional neural networks, and to observe mild cognitive impairment at different stages before the transformation to Alzheimers disease. Results showed that as cognitive deficits increased across the four groups, the shortest path in the resting-state functional network gradually increased, while clustering coefficients gradually decreased. This evidence indicates that dementia is associated with a decline of brain network efficiency. In addition, the changes in functional networks revealed the progressive deterioration of network function across brain regions from healthy elderly adults to those with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimers disease. The alterations of node attributes in brain regions may reflect the cognitive functions in brain regions, and we speculate that early impairments in memory, hearing, and language function can eventually lead to diffuse brain injury and other cognitive impairments.

Disturbed connectivity of EEG functional networks in alcoholism: a graph-theoretic analysis.

Generally, an alcoholics brain shows explicit damage. However, in cognitive tasks, the correlation between the topological structural changes of the brain networks and the brain damage is still unclear. Scalp electrodes and synchronization likelihood (SL) were applied to the constructions of the EGG functional networks of 28 alcoholics and 28 healthy volunteers. The graph-theoretic analysis showed that in cognitive tasks, compared with the healthy control group, the brain networks of alcoholics had smaller clustering coefficients in β1 bands, shorter characteristic path lengths, increased global efficiency, but similar small-world properties. The abnormal topological structure of the alcoholics may be related to the local-function brain damage and the compensation mechanism adopted to complete tasks. This conclusion provides a new perspective for alcohol-related brain damage.

Decreased Complexity in Alzheimer's Disease: Resting-State fMRI Evidence of Brain Entropy Mapping

Alzheimers disease (AD) is a frequently observed, irreversible brain function disorder among elderly individuals. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) has been introduced as an alternative approach to assessing brain functional abnormalities in AD patients. However, alterations in the brain rs-fMRI signal complexities in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and AD patients remain unclear. Here, we described the novel application of permutation entropy (PE) to investigate the abnormal complexity of rs-fMRI signals in MCI and AD patients. The rs-fMRI signals of 30 normal controls (NCs), 33 early MCI (EMCI), 32 late MCI (LMCI), and 29 AD patients were obtained from the Alzheimers disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database. After preprocessing, whole-brain entropy maps of the four groups were extracted and subjected to Gaussian smoothing. We performed a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the brain entropy maps of the four groups. The results after adjusting for age and sex differences together revealed that the patients with AD exhibited lower complexity than did the MCI and NC controls. We found five clusters that exhibited significant differences and were distributed primarily in the occipital, frontal, and temporal lobes. The average PE of the five clusters exhibited a decreasing trend from MCI to AD. The AD group exhibited the least complexity. Additionally, the average PE of the five clusters was significantly positively correlated with the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores and significantly negatively correlated with Functional Assessment Questionnaire (FAQ) scores and global Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) scores in the patient groups. Significant correlations were also found between the PE and regional homogeneity (ReHo) in the patient groups. These results indicated that declines in PE might be related to changes in regional functional homogeneity in AD. These findings suggested that complexity analyses using PE in rs-fMRI signals can provide important information about the fMRI characteristics of cognitive impairments in MCI and AD.

Abnormal Functional Brain Networks in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer’s Disease: A Minimum Spanning Tree Analysis

Alzheimers disease (AD) disrupts the topological architecture of whole-brain connectivity. Minimum spanning tree (MST), which captures the most important connections in a network, has been considered an unbiased method for brain network analysis. However, the alterations in the MST of functional brain networks during the progression of AD remain unclear. Here, we performed an MST analysis to examine the alterations in functional networks among normal controls (NCs), mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients, and AD patients. We identified substantial differences in the connections among the three groups. The maximum betweenness centrality, leaf number, and tree hierarchy of the MSTs showed significant group differences, indicating a more star-like topology in the MCI patients and a more line-like topology in the NCs and AD patients. These findings may correspond to changes in the core of the functional brain networks. For nodal properties (degree and betweenness centrality), we determined that brain regions around the cingulate gyrus, occipital lobes, subcortex, and inferior temporal gyrus showed significant differences among the three groups and contributed to the global topological alterations. The leaf number and tree hierarchy, as well as the nodal properties, were significantly correlated with clinical features in the MCI and AD patients, which demonstrated that more star-to-line topology changes were associated with worse cognitive performance in these patients. These findings indicated that MST properties could capture slight alterations in network topology, particularly for the differences between NCs and MCI patients, and may be applicable as neuroimaging markers of the early stage of AD.

The Abnormality of Topological Asymmetry in Hemispheric Brain Anatomical Networks in Bipolar Disorder

Convergent evidences have demonstrated a variety of regional abnormalities of asymmetry in bipolar disorder (BD). However, little is known about the alterations in hemispheric topological asymmetries. In this study, we used diffusion tensor imaging to construct the hemispheric brain anatomical network of 49 patients with BD and 61 matched normal controls. Graph theory was then applied to quantify topological properties of the hemispheric networks. Although small-world properties were preserved in the hemispheric networks of BD, the degrees of the asymmetry in global efficiency, characteristic path length, and small-world property were significantly decreased. More changes in topological properties of the right hemisphere than those of left hemisphere were found in patients compared with normal controls. Consistent with such changes, the nodal efficiency in patients with BD also showed less rightward asymmetry mainly in the frontal, occipital, parietal, and temporal lobes. In contrast to leftward asymmetry, significant rightward asymmetry was found in supplementary motor area of BD, and attributed to more deficits in nodal efficiency of the left hemisphere. Finally, these asymmetry score of nodal efficiency in the inferior parietal lobule and rolandic operculum were significantly associated with symptom severity of BD. Our results suggested that abnormal hemispheric asymmetries in brain anatomical networks were associated with aberrant neurodevelopment, and providing insights into the potential neural biomarkers of BD by measuring the topological asymmetry in hemispheric brain anatomical networks.

Dynamic Complexity of Spontaneous BOLD Activity in Alzheimer’s Disease and Mild Cognitive Impairment Using Multiscale Entropy Analysis

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is characterized by progressive deterioration of brain function among elderly people. Studies revealed aberrant correlations in spontaneous blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals in resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) over a wide range of temporal scales. However, the study of the temporal dynamics of BOLD signals in subjects with AD and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) remains largely unexplored. Multiscale entropy (MSE) analysis is a method for estimating the complexity of finite time series over multiple time scales. In this research, we applied MSE analysis to investigate the abnormal complexity of BOLD signals using the rs-fMRI data from the Alzheimer’s disease neuroimaging initiative (ADNI) database. There were 30 normal controls (NCs), 33 early MCI (EMCI), 32 late MCI (LMCI), and 29 AD patients. Following preprocessing of the BOLD signals, whole-brain MSE maps across six time scales were generated using the Complexity Toolbox. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) analysis on the MSE maps of four groups revealed significant differences in the thalamus, insula, lingual gyrus and inferior occipital gyrus, superior frontal gyrus and olfactory cortex, supramarginal gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, and middle temporal gyrus on multiple time scales. Compared with the NC group, MCI and AD patients had significant reductions in the complexity of BOLD signals and AD patients demonstrated lower complexity than that of the MCI subjects. Additionally, the complexity of BOLD signals from the regions of interest (ROIs) was found to be significantly associated with cognitive decline in patient groups on multiple time scales. Consequently, the complexity or MSE of BOLD signals may provide an imaging biomarker of cognitive impairments in MCI and AD.

Epileptic Seizure Prediction Based on Permutation Entropy

Epilepsy is a chronic non-communicable disorder of the brain that affects individuals of all ages. It is caused by a sudden abnormal discharge of brain neurons leading to temporary dysfunction. In this regard, if seizures could be predicted a reasonable period of time before their occurrence, epilepsy patients could take precautions against them and improve their safety and quality of life. However, the potential that permutation entropy(PE) can be applied in human epilepsy prediction from intracranial electroencephalogram (iEEG) recordings remains unclear. Here, we described the novel application of PE to track the dynamical changes of human brain activity from iEEG recordings for the epileptic seizure prediction. The iEEG signals of 19 patients were obtained from the Epilepsy Centre at the University Hospital of Freiburg. After preprocessing, PE was extracted in a sliding time window, and a support vector machine (SVM) was employed to discriminate cerebral state. Then a two-step post-processing method was applied for the purpose of prediction. The results showed that we obtained an average sensitivity (SS) of 94% and false prediction rates (FPR) with 0.111 h−1. The best results with SS of 100% and FPR of 0 h−1 were achieved for some patients. The average prediction horizon was 61.93 min, leaving sufficient treatment time before a seizure. These results indicated that applying PE as a feature to extract information and SVM for classification could predict seizures, and the presented method shows great potential in clinical seizure prediction for human.

Increased Functional Brain Network Efficiency During Audiovisual Temporal Asynchrony Integration Task in Aging

Audiovisual integration significantly changes over the lifespan, but age-related functional connectivity in audiovisual temporal asynchrony integration tasks remains underexplored. In the present study, electroencephalograms (EEGs) of 27 young adults (22–25 years) and 25 old adults (61–76 years) were recorded during an audiovisual temporal asynchrony integration task with seven conditions [auditory (A), visual (V), AV, A50V, A100V, V50A and V100A]. We calculated the phase lag index (PLI)-weighted connectivity networks modulated by the audiovisual tasks and found that the PLI connections showed obvious dynamic changes after stimulus onset. In the theta (4–7 Hz) and alpha (8–13 Hz) bands, the AV and V50A conditions induced stronger functional connections and higher global and local efficiencies, reflecting a stronger audiovisual integration effect, which was attributed to the auditory information arriving at the primary auditory cortex earlier than the visual information reaching the primary visual cortex. Importantly, the functional connectivity and network efficiencies of old adults revealed higher global and local efficiencies and higher degree in both the theta and alpha bands. These larger network efficiencies indicated that old adults might experience more difficulties in attention and cognitive control during the audiovisual integration task with temporal asynchrony than young adults. There were significant associations between network efficiencies and peak time of integration only in young adults. We propose that an audiovisual task with multiple conditions might arouse the appropriate attention in young adults but would lead to a ceiling effect in old adults. Our findings provide new insights into the network topography of old adults during audiovisual integration and highlight higher functional connectivity and network efficiencies due to greater cognitive demand.

Reduced hemispheric asymmetry of brain anatomical networks in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Despite many studies reporting a variety of alterations in brain networks in patients with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), alterations in hemispheric anatomical networks are still unclear. In this study, we investigated topology alterations in hemispheric white matter in patients with ADHD and the relationship between these alterations and clinical features of the illness. Weighted hemispheric brain anatomical networks were first constructed for each of 40 right-handed patients with ADHD and 53 matched normal controls. Then, graph theoretical approaches were utilized to compute hemispheric topological properties. The small-world property was preserved in the hemispheric network. Furthermore, a significant group-by-hemisphere interaction was revealed in global efficiency, local efficiency and characteristic path length, attributed to the significantly reduced hemispheric asymmetry of global and local integration in patients with ADHD compared with normal controls. Specifically, reduced asymmetric regional efficiency was found in three regions. Finally, we found that the abnormal asymmetry of hemispheric brain anatomical network topology and regional efficiency were both associated with clinical features (the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale and Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale) in patients. Our findings provide new insights into the lateralized nature of hemispheric dysconnectivity and highlight the potential for using brain network measures of hemispheric asymmetry as neural biomarkers for ADHD and its clinical features.