Research on Channel Selection and Multi-Feature Fusion of EEG Signals for Mental Fatigue Detection

With the rapid development of modern social science and technology, the pace of life is getting faster, and brain fatigue has become a sub-health state that seriously affects the normal life of people. Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals reflect changes in the central nervous system. Using EEG signals to assess mental fatigue is a research hotspot in related fields. Most existing fatigue detection methods are time-consuming or don’t achieve satisfactory results due to insufficient features extracted from EEG signals. In this paper, a 2-back task is designed to induce fatigue. The weight value of each channel under a single feature is calculated by ReliefF algorithm. The classification accuracy of each channel under the corresponding features is analyzed. The classification accuracy of each single channel is combined to perform weighted summation to obtain the weight value of each channel. The first half channels sorted in descending order based on the weight value is chosen as the common channels. Multi-features in frequency and time domains are extracted from the common channel data, and the sparse representation method is used to perform feature fusion to obtain sparse fused features. Finally, the SRDA classifier is used to detect the fatigue state. Experimental results show that the proposed methods in our work effectively reduce the number of channels for computation and also improve the mental fatigue detection accuracy.     

Exploring the Alterations in the Distribution of Neural Network Weights in Dementia Due to Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder which has become an outstanding social problem. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the alterations that dementia due to AD elicits in the distribution of functional network weights. Functional connectivity networks were obtained using the orthogonalized Amplitude Envelope Correlation (AEC), computed from source-reconstructed resting-state eletroencephalographic (EEG) data in a population formed by 45 cognitive healthy elderly controls, 69 mild cognitive impaired (MCI) patients and 81 AD patients. Our results indicated that AD induces a progressive alteration of network weights distribution; specifically, the Shannon entropy (SE) of the weights distribution showed statistically significant between-group differences (p < 0.05, Kruskal-Wallis test, False Discovery Rate corrected). Furthermore, an in-depth analysis of network weights distributions was performed in delta, alpha, and beta-1 frequency bands to discriminate the weight ranges showing statistical differences in SE. Our results showed that lower and higher weights were more affected by the disease, whereas mid-range connections remained unchanged. These findings support the importance of performing detailed analyses of the network weights distribution to further understand the impact of AD progression on functional brain activity.     

A Comparative Study of Functional Connectivity Measures for Brain Network Analysis in the Context of AD Detection with EEG

This work addresses brain network analysis considering different clinical severity stages of cognitive dysfunction, based on resting-state electroencephalography (EEG). We use a cohort acquired in real-life clinical conditions, which contains EEG data of subjective cognitive impairment (SCI) patients, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients, and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients. We propose to exploit an epoch-based entropy measure to quantify the connectivity links in the networks. This entropy measure relies on a refined statistical modeling of EEG signals with Hidden Markov Models, which allow a better estimation of the spatiotemporal characteristics of EEG signals. We also propose to conduct a comparative study by considering three other measures largely used in the literature: phase lag index, coherence, and mutual information. We calculated such measures at different frequency bands and computed different local graph parameters considering different proportional threshold values for a binary network analysis. After applying a feature selection procedure to determine the most relevant features for classification performance with a linear Support Vector Machine algorithm, our study demonstrates the effectiveness of the statistical entropy measure for analyzing the brain network in patients with different stages of cognitive dysfunction.     

摩擦诱发的事件相关电位认知成分特征研究

本研究旨在讨论人在探索物体表面时由物体表面摩擦属性的影响而引起的脑电变化.而事件相关电位技术是观测这一变化的理想手段.试验通过Neuroscan 64导事件相关电位采集系统来采集脑电信号,采用Oddball范式来诱发P300电位,并观察摩擦诱发的事件相关电位的认知成分P300的潜伏期和峰值特点.样本为摩擦系数不一样但其他属性基本一致的三种纸类.受试者通过手指主动触摸的方式判断物体表面摩擦力大小,观察此过程中的事件相关电位.试验发现,摩擦系数大样本诱发的P300的潜伏期小,峰值大.摩擦系数小的样本诱发的P300潜伏期大,峰值小.     

Working Memory Decline in Alzheimer’s Disease Is Detected by Complexity Analysis of Multimodal EEG-fNIRS

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is characterized by working memory (WM) failures that can be assessed at early stages through administering clinical tests. Ecological neuroimaging, such as Electroencephalography (EEG) and functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), may be employed during these tests to support AD early diagnosis within clinical settings. Multimodal EEG-fNIRS could measure brain activity along with neurovascular coupling (NC) and detect their modifications associated with AD. Data analysis procedures based on signal complexity are suitable to estimate electrical and hemodynamic brain activity or their mutual information (NC) during non-structured experimental paradigms. In this study, sample entropy of whole-head EEG and frontal/prefrontal cortex fNIRS was evaluated to assess brain activity in early AD and healthy controls (HC) during WM tasks (i.e., Rey–Osterrieth complex figure and Raven’s progressive matrices). Moreover, conditional entropy between EEG and fNIRS was evaluated as indicative of NC. The findings demonstrated the capability of complexity analysis of multimodal EEG-fNIRS to detect WM decline in AD. Furthermore, a multivariate data-driven analysis, performed on these entropy metrics and based on the General Linear Model, allowed classifying AD and HC with an AUC up to 0.88. EEG-fNIRS may represent a powerful tool for the clinical evaluation of WM decline in early AD.     

Improved visibility graph fractality with application for the diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder

Recently, the visibility graph (VG) algorithm was proposed for mapping a time series to a graph to study complexity and fractality of the time series through investigation of the complexity of its graph. The visibility graph algorithm converts a fractal time series to a scale-free graph. VG has been used for the investigation of fractality in the dynamic behavior of both artificial and natural complex systems. However, robustness and performance of the power of scale-freeness of VG (PSVG) as an effective method for measuring fractality has not been investigated. Since noise is unavoidable in real life time series, the robustness of a fractality measure is of paramount importance. To improve the accuracy and robustness of PSVG to noise for measurement of fractality of time series in biological time-series, an improved PSVG is presented in this paper. The proposed method is evaluated using two examples: a synthetic benchmark time series and a complicated real life Electroencephalograms (EEG)-based diagnostic problem, that is distinguishing autistic children from non-autistic children. It is shown that the proposed improved PSVG is less sensitive to noise and therefore more robust compared with PSVG. Further, it is shown that using improved PSVG in the wavelet-chaos neural network model of Adeli and c-workers in place of the Katz fractality dimension results in a more accurate diagnosis of autism, a complicated neurological and psychiatric disorder.     

Cross-Subject Emotion Recognition Using Fused Entropy Features of EEG

Emotion recognition based on electroencephalography (EEG) has attracted high interest in fields such as health care, user experience evaluation, and human–computer interaction (HCI), as it plays an important role in human daily life. Although various approaches have been proposed to detect emotion states in previous studies, there is still a need to further study the dynamic changes of EEG in different emotions to detect emotion states accurately. Entropy-based features have been proved to be effective in mining the complexity information in EEG in many areas. However, different entropy features vary in revealing the implicit information of EEG. To improve system reliability, in this paper, we propose a framework for EEG-based cross-subject emotion recognition using fused entropy features and a Bidirectional Long Short-term Memory (BiLSTM) network. Features including approximate entropy (AE), fuzzy entropy (FE), Rényi entropy (RE), differential entropy (DE), and multi-scale entropy (MSE) are first calculated to study dynamic emotional information. Then, we train a BiLSTM classifier with the inputs of entropy features to identify different emotions. Our results show that MSE of EEG is more efficient than other single-entropy features in recognizing emotions. The performance of BiLSTM is further improved with an accuracy of 70.05% using fused entropy features compared with that of single-type feature.     

Deep Sparse Autoencoder and Recursive Neural Network for EEG Emotion Recognition

Recently, emotional electroencephalography (EEG) has been of great importance in brain–computer interfaces, and it is more urgent to realize automatic emotion recognition. The EEG signal has the disadvantages of being non-smooth, non-linear, stochastic, and susceptible to background noise. Additionally, EEG signal processing network models have the disadvantages of a large number of parameters and long training time. To address the above issues, a novel model is presented in this paper. Initially, a deep sparse autoencoder network (DSAE) was used to remove redundant information from the EEG signal and reconstruct its underlying features. Further, combining a convolutional neural network (CNN) with long short-term memory (LSTM) can extract relevant features from task-related features, mine the correlation between the 32 channels of the EEG signal, and integrate contextual information from these frames. The proposed DSAE + CNN + LSTM (DCRNN) model was experimented with on the public dataset DEAP. The classification accuracies of valence and arousal reached 76.70% and 81.43%, respectively. Meanwhile, we conducted experiments with other comparative methods to further demonstrate the effectiveness of the DCRNN method.     

Neuron Synchronization and Human EEG Phenomenology Simulation

The observed low correlation dimension of the EEG—ascribed to the high synchronization degree of the brain activity—encourages the use of more or less realistic neural networks for the parametrization and classification of cerebral rhythms via simulation. We have therefore tried to explain the electrocortical activity in terms of synchronization using a map inspired to the integrate and fire neuron model. An extension apt to the heuristic simulation of the rhythm phenomenology is also presented and applied to the reproduction of chaos features in brain activity.     

Nonlinear similarity analysis for epileptic seizures prediction

The prediction of epileptic seizures can promise a new diagnostic application and a novel approach for seizure control. This paper proposes an improved dynamical similarity measure to predict epileptic seizures in electroencephalographic (EEG). First, mutual information and Cao's method are employed to reconstruct a phase space of preprocessed EEG recordings by using the positive zero crossing method. Second, a Gaussian function replaces the Heavyside function within correlation integral at calculating a similarity index. The crisp boundary of the Heavyside function is eliminated because of the Gaussian function's smooth boundary. Third, an adaptive detection method based on the similarity index is proposed to predict the epileptic seizures. In light of test results of EEG recordings of rats, it is found that the new dynamical similarity index is insensitive to the selection of the radius value of Gaussian function and the size of segmented EEG recordings. Comparing with the dynamical similarity index proposed by Le Van Quyen et al. [Anticipating epileptic seizures in real time by a non-linear analysis of similarity between EEG recordings, NeuroReport 10 (1999) 2149–2155], the tests of twelve rats show the new dynamical similarity index is better to predict the epileptic seizures.