Book
Methodological school: Methods of data processing in EEG and MEG. Applied aspects of magneto-and electroencephalographic neuroimaging. April, 16-30, 2013
The Abstract book contains the abstracts of the posters presentations of the participants of the Methodological school: Methods of data processing in EEG and MEG, Moscow, 16-30th of April, 2013. The School was devoted to the theoretical and practical aspects of the contemporary methods of the dynamic mapping of brain activity by analysis of multichannel MEG and EEG.
It is well known, that even in optimal conditions animals and humans make spontaneous errors which are the most prominent manifestations of attention system failures. Our goal was to investigate the causes of attention system failures in normal state of arousal and without distracting objects. We have designed a new task which allows to answer the following question: which stage of sensory processing is compromised during attention lapses?
Increasing evidence suggests that neuronal communication is a defining property of functionally specialized brain networks and that it is implemented through synchronization between population activities of distinct brain areas. The detection of long-range coupling in electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) data using conventional metrics (such as coherence or phase-locking value) is by definition contaminated by spatial leakage. Methods such as imaginary coherence, phase-lag index or orthogonalized amplitude correlations tackle spatial leakage by ignoring zero-phase interactions. Although useful, these metrics will by construction lead to false negatives in cases where true zero-phase coupling exists in the data and will underestimate interactions with phase lags in the vicinity of zero. Yet, empirically observed neuronal synchrony in invasive recordings indicates that it is not uncommon to find zero or close-to-zero phase lag between the activity profiles of coupled neuronal assemblies. Here, we introduce a novel method that allows us to mitigate the undesired spatial leakage effects and detect zero and near zero phase interactions. To this end, we propose a projection operation that operates on sensor-space cross-spectrum and suppresses the spatial leakage contribution but retains the true zero-phase interaction component. We then solve the network estimation task as a source estimation problem defined in the product space of interacting source topographies. We show how this framework provides reliable interaction detection for all phase-lag values and we thus refer to the method as Phase Shift Invariant Imaging of Coherent Sources (PSIICOS). Realistic simulations demonstrate that PSIICOS has better detector characteristics than existing interaction metrics. Finally, we illustrate the performance of PSIICOS by applying it to real MEG dataset recorded during a standard mental rotation task. Taken together, using analytical derivations, data simulations and real brain data, this study presents a novel source-space MEG/EEG connectivity method that overcomes previous limitations and for the first time allows for the estimation of true zero-phase coupling via non-invasive electrophysiological recordings.
The Abstract book contains the abstracts of the posters presentations of the participants of the Methodological school: Methods of data processing in EEg and MEG, Moscow, 16-30th of April, 2013. The School was devoted to the theoretical and practical aspects of the contemporary methods of the dynamic mapping of brain activity by analysis of multichannel MEG and EEG.
Language is a uniquely human cognitive function which plays a defining role in our psychological and social traits. Despite the obvious importance of language and speech, they remain one of the least understood human cognitive functions with the cortical underpinnings of these crucial skills still obscure. In recent decades, a large amount of data that account for the neural bases of language processes in both children and adults have been acquired through the use of many advanced neurophysiology techniques. These include high-density electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography, functional magnetic-resonance tomography, transcranial magnetic stimulation, transcranial direct current stimulation, and eye-tracking. The combined use of these approaches continues to shed light on brain mechanisms of language acquisition, comprehension and processing, on speech disorders and their treatment, and on interactions between language and other neurocognitive systems and functions. The aim of this Research Topic in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience is to provide a state-of-the-art overview of this diverse and multidisciplinary area of research, with special emphasis on bridging the gap between different methodologies.
The problem of non-invasive preoperative localization of motor areas in human cortex has not been solved yet. In clinical practice, localization of the hand representation in the primary motor cortex often becomes one of the main goals of the pre-surgical evaluation. In healthy subjects the area of the motor hand representation usually corresponds to certain standard anatomical landmarks (hand knob in the precentral gyrus), which can be easily found in sMRI images. Unfortunately, in patients with various brain lesions these landmarks may be absent or not corresponding to the area of the motor cortex. In such cases, location of irreplacable areas must be determined according to their functional and/or temporal dynamical characteristics.
It might become a promising method of localizing primary motor area by way of taking into account the characteristic properties of the primary motor cortex temporal dynamics during movement preparation.