scholarly journals An extension of Phase Linearity Measurement for revealing cross frequency coupling among brain areas

Author(s):  
Pierpaolo Sorrentino ◽  
Michele Ambrosanio ◽  
Rosaria Rucco ◽  
Fabio Baselice

Abstract Background Brain areas need to coordinate their activity in order to enable complex behavioral responses. Synchronization is one of the mechanisms neural ensembles use to communicate. While synchronization between signals operating at similar frequencies is fairly straightforward, the estimation of synchronization occurring between different frequencies of oscillations has proven harder to capture. One specifically hard challenge is to estimate cross-frequency synchronization between broadband signals when no a priori hypothesis is available about the frequencies involved in the synchronization. Methods In the present manuscript, we expand upon the phase linearity measurement, an iso-frequency synchronization metrics previously developed by our group, in order to provide a conceptually similar approach able to detect the presence of cross-frequency synchronization between any components of the analyzed broadband signals. Results The methodology has been tested on both synthetic and real data. We first exploited Gaussian process realizations in order to explore the properties of our new metrics in a synthetic case study. Subsequently, we analyze real source-reconstructed data acquired by a magnetoencephalographic system from healthy controls in a clinical setting to study the performance of our metrics in a realistic environment. Conclusions In the present paper we provide an evolution of the PLM methodology able to reveal the presence of cross-frequency synchronization between broadband data.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierpaolo Sorrentino ◽  
Michele Ambrosanio ◽  
Rosaria Rucco ◽  
Joana Cabral ◽  
Leonardo L. Gollo ◽  
...  

AbstractThe current paper proposes a method to estimate phase to phase cross-frequency coupling between brain areas, applied to broadband signals, without any a priori hypothesis about the frequency of the synchronized components. N:m synchronization is the only form of cross-frequency synchronization that allows the exchange of information at the time resolution of the faster signal, hence likely to play a fundamental role in large-scale coordination of brain activity. The proposed method, named cross-frequency phase linearity measurement (CF-PLM), builds and expands upon the phase linearity measurement, an iso-frequency connectivity metrics previously published by our group. The main idea lies in using the shape of the interferometric spectrum of the two analyzed signals in order to estimate the strength of cross-frequency coupling. Here, we demonstrate that the CF-PLM successfully retrieves the (different) frequencies of the original broad-band signals involved in the connectivity process. Furthermore, if the broadband signal has some frequency components that are synchronized in iso-frequency and some others that are synchronized in cross-frequency, our methodology can successfully disentangle them and describe the behaviour of each frequency component separately. We first provide a theoretical explanation of the metrics. Then, we test the proposed metric on simulated data from coupled oscillators synchronized in iso- and cross-frequency (using both Rössler and Kuramoto oscillator models), and subsequently apply it on real data from brain activity, using source-reconstructed Magnetoencephalography (MEG) data. In the synthetic data, our results show reliable estimates even in the presence of noise and limited sample sizes. In the real signals, components synchronized in cross-frequency are retrieved, together with their oscillation frequencies. All in all, our method is useful to estimate n:m synchronization, based solely on the phase of the signals (independently of the amplitude), and no a-priori hypothesis is available about the expected frequencies. Our method can be exploited to more accurately describe patterns of cross-frequency synchronization and determine the central frequencies involved in the coupling.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chi-Hung Juan ◽  
Kien Trong Nguyen ◽  
Wei-Kuang Liang ◽  
Andrew J. Quinn ◽  
Yen-Hsun Chen ◽  
...  

Patterns in external sensory stimuli can rapidly entrain neuronally generated oscillations observed in electrophysiological data. Here, we manipulated the temporal dynamics of visual stimuli with cross-frequency coupling (CFC) characteristics to generate steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs). Although CFC plays a pivotal role in neural communication, some cases reporting CFC may be false positives due to non-sinusoidal oscillations that can generate artificially inflated coupling values. Additionally, temporal characteristics of dynamic and non-linear neural oscillations cannot be fully derived with conventional Fourier-based analyses mainly due to trade off of temporal resolution for frequency precision. In an attempt to resolve these limitations of linear analytical methods, Holo-Hilbert Spectral Analysis (HHSA) was investigated as a potential approach for examination of non-linear and non-stationary CFC dynamics in this study. Results from both simulation and SSVEPs demonstrated that temporal dynamic and non-linear CFC features can be revealed with HHSA. Specifically, the results of simulation showed that the HHSA is less affected by the non-sinusoidal oscillation and showed possible cross frequency interactions embedded in the simulation without any a priori assumptions. In the SSVEPs, we found that the time-varying cross-frequency interaction and the bidirectional coupling between delta and alpha/beta bands can be observed using HHSA, confirming dynamic physiological signatures of neural entrainment related to cross-frequency coupling. These findings not only validate the efficacy of the HHSA in revealing the natural characteristics of signals, but also shed new light on further applications in analysis of brain electrophysiological data with the aim of understanding the functional roles of neuronal oscillation in various cognitive functions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio José Ibáñez-Molina ◽  
María Felipa Soriano ◽  
Sergio Iglesias-Parro

Electroencephalograms (EEG) are one of the most commonly used measures to study brain functioning at a macroscopic level. The structure of the EEG time series is composed of many neural rhythms interacting at different spatiotemporal scales. This interaction is often named as cross frequency coupling, and consists of transient couplings between various parameters of different rhythms. This coupling has been hypothesized to be a basic mechanism involved in cognitive functions. There are several methods to measure cross frequency coupling between two rhythms but no single method has been selected as the gold standard. Current methods only serve to explore two rhythms at a time, are computationally demanding, and impose assumptions about the nature of the signal. Here we present a new approach based on Information Theory in which we can characterize the interaction of more than two rhythms in a given EEG time series. It estimates the mutual information of multiple rhythms (MIMR) extracted from the original signal. We tested this measure using simulated and real empirical data. We simulated signals composed of three frequencies and background noise. When the coupling between each frequency component was manipulated, we found a significant variation in the MIMR. In addition, we found that MIMR was sensitive to real EEG time series collected with open vs. closed eyes, and intra-cortical recordings from epileptic and non-epileptic signals registered at different regions of the brain. MIMR is presented as a tool to explore multiple rhythms, easy to compute and without a priori assumptions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Camilo Broc ◽  
Therese Truong ◽  
Benoit Liquet

Abstract Background The increasing number of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) has revealed several loci that are associated to multiple distinct phenotypes, suggesting the existence of pleiotropic effects. Highlighting these cross-phenotype genetic associations could help to identify and understand common biological mechanisms underlying some diseases. Common approaches test the association between genetic variants and multiple traits at the SNP level. In this paper, we propose a novel gene- and a pathway-level approach in the case where several independent GWAS on independent traits are available. The method is based on a generalization of the sparse group Partial Least Squares (sgPLS) to take into account groups of variables, and a Lasso penalization that links all independent data sets. This method, called joint-sgPLS, is able to convincingly detect signal at the variable level and at the group level. Results Our method has the advantage to propose a global readable model while coping with the architecture of data. It can outperform traditional methods and provides a wider insight in terms of a priori information. We compared the performance of the proposed method to other benchmark methods on simulated data and gave an example of application on real data with the aim to highlight common susceptibility variants to breast and thyroid cancers. Conclusion The joint-sgPLS shows interesting properties for detecting a signal. As an extension of the PLS, the method is suited for data with a large number of variables. The choice of Lasso penalization copes with architectures of groups of variables and observations sets. Furthermore, although the method has been applied to a genetic study, its formulation is adapted to any data with high number of variables and an exposed a priori architecture in other application fields.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (13) ◽  
pp. 6005
Author(s):  
Daniel Villanueva ◽  
Moisés Cordeiro-Costas ◽  
Andrés E. Feijóo-Lorenzo ◽  
Antonio Fernández-Otero ◽  
Edelmiro Miguez-García

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the question regarding whether the integration of an electric battery as a part of a domestic installation may increase its energy efficiency in comparison with a conventional case. When a battery is included in such an installation, two types of electrical conversion must be considered, i.e., AC/DC and DC/AC, and hence the corresponding losses due to these converters must not be forgotten when performing the analysis. The efficiency of the whole system can be increased if one of the mentioned converters is avoided or simply when its dimensioning is reduced. Possible ways to achieve this goal can be: to use electric vehicles as DC suppliers, the use of as many DC home devices as possible, and LED lighting or charging devices based on renewables. With all this in mind, several scenarios are proposed here in order to have a look at all possibilities concerning AC and DC powering. With the aim of checking these scenarios using real data, a case study is analyzed by operating with electricity consumption mean values.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
N. Vanello ◽  
E. Ricciardi ◽  
L. Landini

Independent component analysis (ICA) of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data can be employed as an exploratory method. The lack in the ICA model of strong a priori assumptions about the signal or about the noise leads to difficult interpretations of the results. Moreover, the statistical independence of the components is only approximated. Residual dependencies among the components can reveal informative structure in the data. A major problem is related to model order selection, that is, the number of components to be extracted. Specifically, overestimation may lead to component splitting. In this work, a method based on hierarchical clustering of ICA applied to fMRI datasets is investigated. The clustering algorithm uses a metric based on the mutual information between the ICs. To estimate the similarity measure, a histogram-based technique and one based on kernel density estimation are tested on simulated datasets. Simulations results indicate that the method could be used to cluster components related to the same task and resulting from a splitting process occurring at different model orders. Different performances of the similarity measures were found and discussed. Preliminary results on real data are reported and show that the method can group task related and transiently task related components.


Author(s):  
Jon López-Azcárate ◽  
María Jesús Nicolás ◽  
Ivan Cordon ◽  
Manuel Alegre ◽  
Miguel Valencia ◽  
...  

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