Discrimination of Tourette Syndrome Based on the Spatial Patterns of the Resting-State EEG Network.

Tourette syndrome (TS) is a neuropsychiatric disorder with childhood onset characterized by chronic motor and vocal tics; however, the current diagnosis of TS patients is subjective, as it is mainly assessed based on the parents' description alongside specific evaluations. The early and accurate diagnosis of TS based on its potential symptoms in children would be of benefit in their future therapy, but reliable diagnoses are difficult due to the lack of objective knowledge of the etiology and pathogenesis of TS. In this study, resting-state electroencephalograms were first collected from 36 patients and 21 healthy controls (HCs); the corresponding resting-state functional networks were then constructed, and the potential differences in network topology between the two groups were extracted by using the topology of the spatial pattern of the network (SPN). Compared to the HCs, the TS patients exhibited decreased frontotemporal/occipital/parietal connectivity. When classifying the two groups, compared to the network properties, the derived SPN features achieved a much higher accuracy of 92.31%. The intrinsic long-range connectivity between the frontal and the temporal/occipital/parietal lobes was damaged in the patient group, and this dysfunctional network pattern might serve as a reliable biomarker to differentiate TS patients from HCs as well as to assess the severity of tic symptoms.

Predicting individual decision-making responses based on single-trial EEG.

Decision-making plays an essential role in the interpersonal interactions and cognitive processing of individuals. There has been increasing interest in being able to predict an individual's decision-making response (i.e., acceptance or rejection). We proposed an electroencephalogram (EEG)-based computational intelligence framework to predict individual responses. Specifically, the discriminative spatial network pattern (DSNP), a supervised learning approach, was applied to single-trial EEG data to extract the DSNP feature from the single-trial brain network. A linear discriminate analysis (LDA) trained on the DSNP features was then used to predict the individual response trial-by-trial. To verify the performance of the proposed DSNP, we recruited two independent subject groups, and recorded the EEGs using two types of EEG systems. The performances of the trial-by-trial predictors achieved an accuracy of 0.88 ±â€¯0.09 for the first dataset, and 0.90 ±â€¯0.10 for the second dataset. These trial-by-trial prediction performances suggested that individual responses could be predicted trial-by-trial by using the specific pattern of single-trial EEG networks, and our proposed method has the potential to establish the biologically inspired artificial intelligence decision system.

Different Decision-Making Responses Occupy Different Brain Networks for Information Processing: A Study Based on EEG and TMS.

This study used large-scale time-varying network analysis to reveal the diverse network patterns during the different decision stages and found that the responses of rejection and acceptance involved different network structures. When participants accept unfair offers, the brain recruits a more bottom-up mechanism with a much stronger information flow from the visual cortex (O2) to the frontal area, but when they reject unfair offers, it displayed a more top-down flow derived from the frontal cortex (Fz) to the parietal and occipital cortices. Furthermore, we performed 2 additional studies to validate the above network models: one was to identify the 2 responses based on the out-degree information of network hub nodes, which results in 70% accuracy, and the other utilized theta burst stimulation (TBS) of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to modulate the frontal area before the decision-making tasks. We found that the intermittent TBS group demonstrated lower acceptance rates and that the continuous TBS group showed higher acceptance rates compared with the sham group. Similar effects were not observed after TBS of a control site. These results suggest that the revealed decision-making network model can serve as a potential intervention model to alter decision responses.

Noise-assisted multivariate empirical mode decomposition for multichannel EMG signals.

BACKGROUND: Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) has been popularised for single-channel Electromyography (EMG) signal processing as it can effectively extract the temporal information of the EMG time series. However, few papers examine the temporal and spatial characteristics across multiple muscle groups in relation to multichannel EMG signals. EXPERIMENT: The experimental data was obtained from the Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems, University of California Irvine (UCI). The data was donated by the Nueva Granada Military University and the Technopark node Manizales in Colombia. The databases of 11 male subjects from the healthy group were taken into the study. The subjects undergo three exercise programs, leg extension from a sitting position (sitting), flexion of the leg up (standing), and gait (walking), while four electrodes were placed on biceps femoris (BF), vastus medialis (VM), rectus femoris (RF), and semitendinosus (ST). METHODS: Based on the experimental data, a comparative study is provided by assessing the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD)-based approaches, EEMD, Multivariate EMD (MEMD), and Noise-Assisted MEMD (NA-MEMD). The outcomes from these approaches are then quantitatively estimated on the basis of three criterions, the number of Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs), mode-alignment and mode-mixing. RESULTS: Both MEMD and NA-MEMD methods (except EEMD) can guarantee equal numbers of IMFs. For mode-alignment and mode-mixing, NA-MEMD is optimal compared with MEMD and EEMD, and MEMD is merely better than EEMD. CONCLUSIONS: This study proposes the NA-MEMD approach for multichannel EMG signal processing. This finding implies that NA-MEMD is effective for simultaneously analysing IMFs based frequency bands. It has a vital clinical implication in exploring the neuromuscular patterns that enable the multiple muscle groups to coordinate while performing the functional activities of daily living.

Recognition of autism spectrum disorder in children based on electroencephalogram network topology.

Although our knowledge of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been deepened, the accurate diagnosis of ASD from normal individuals is still left behind. In this study, we proposed to apply the spatial pattern of the network topology (SPN) to identify children with ASD from normal ones. Based on two independent batches of electroencephalogram datasets collected separately, the accurate recognition of ASD from normal children was achieved by applying the proposed SPN features. Since decreased long-range connectivity was identified for children with ASD, the SPN features extracted from the distinctive topological architecture between two groups in the first dataset were used to validate the capacity of SPN in classifying ASD, and the SPN features achieved the highest accuracy of 92.31%, which outperformed the other features e.g., power spectrum density (84.62%), network properties (76.92%), and sample entropy (73.08%). Moreover, within the second dataset, by using the model trained in the first dataset, the SPN also acquired the highest sensitivity in recognizing ASD, when compared to the other features. These results consistently illustrated that the functional brain network, especially the intrinsic spatial network topology, might be the potential biomarker for the diagnosis of ASD.

Exploring the Interrelationships between Public Health, Fiscal Decentralization, and Local Government Debt in China.

This paper investigates the interrelationships among local government debt, fiscal decentralization, and public health. The investigation begins by constructing a theoretical model to analyze the inherent connections between these variables. Subsequently, an empirical analysis is conducted using data from China between 2015 and 2021. The findings demonstrate a bidirectional relationship between fiscal decentralization, local government debt, and public health. Specifically, it is observed that an increase in local government debt has adverse effects on both fiscal decentralization and public health, while fiscal decentralization has a positive impact on public health. These insights are consistently validated through rigorous regression methodologies, affirming the robustness and significance of these relationships.

Exploring the Temporal Patterns of Dynamic Information Flow during Attention Network Test (ANT).

The attentional processes are conceptualized as a system of anatomical brain areas involving three specialized networks of alerting, orienting and executive control, each of which has been proven to have a relation with specified time-frequency oscillations through electrophysiological techniques. Nevertheless, at present, it is still unclear how the idea of these three independent attention networks is reflected in the specific short-time topology propagation of the brain, assembled with complexity and precision. In this study, we investigated the temporal patterns of dynamic information flow in each attention network via electroencephalograph (EEG)-based analysis. A modified version of the attention network test (ANT) with an EEG recording was adopted to probe the dynamic topology propagation in the three attention networks. First, the event-related potentials (ERP) analysis was used to extract sub-stage networks corresponding to the role of each attention network. Then, the dynamic network model of each attention network was constructed by post hoc test between conditions followed by the short-time-windows fitting model and brain network construction. We found that the alerting involved long-range interaction among the prefrontal cortex and posterior cortex of brain. The orienting elicited more sparse information flow after the target onset in the frequency band 1-30 Hz, and the executive control contained complex top-down control originating from the frontal cortex of the brain. Moreover, the switch of the activated regions in the associated time courses was elicited in attention networks contributing to diverse processing stages, which further extends our knowledge of the mechanism of attention networks.

LDER: a classification framework based on ERP enhancement in RSVP task.

Objective.Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) based on electroencephalography (EEG) has been widely used in the target detection field, which distinguishes target and non-target by detecting event-related potential (ERP) components. However, the classification performance of the RSVP task is limited by the variability of ERP components, which is a great challenge in developing RSVP for real-life applications.Approach.To tackle this issue, a classification framework based on the ERP feature enhancement to offset the negative impact of the variability of ERP components for RSVP task classification named latency detection and EEG reconstruction was proposed in this paper. First, a spatial-temporal similarity measurement approach was proposed for latency detection. Subsequently, we constructed a single-trial EEG signal model containing ERP latency information. Then, according to the latency information detected in the first step, the model can be solved to obtain the corrected ERP signal and realize the enhancement of ERP features. Finally, the EEG signal after ERP enhancement can be processed by most of the existing feature extraction and classification methods of the RSVP task in this framework.Main results.Nine subjects were recruited to participate in the RSVP experiment on vehicle detection. Four popular algorithms (spatially weighted Fisher linear discrimination-principal component analysis (PCA), hierarchical discriminant PCA, hierarchical discriminant component analysis, and spatial-temporal hybrid common spatial pattern-PCA) in RSVP-based brain-computer interface for feature extraction were selected to verify the performance of our proposed framework. Experimental results showed that our proposed framework significantly outperforms the conventional classification framework in terms of area under curve, balanced accuracy, true positive rate, and false positive rate in four feature extraction methods. Additionally, statistical results showed that our proposed framework enables better performance with fewer training samples, channel numbers, and shorter temporal window sizes.Significance.As a result, the classification performance of the RSVP task was significantly improved by using our proposed framework. Our proposed classification framework will significantly promote the practical application of the RSVP task.

Nonlinear Relationship between Financial Development and CO2 Emissions-Based on a PSTR Model.

The contradiction between financial development and environmental pollution has become increasingly prominent with economic development. The discovery of the link between financial development and carbon dioxide emissions will aid in the development of solutions to this problem. This paper uses a panel smooth transition regression (PSTR) model to examine the impact of financial development on carbon dioxide emissions using panel data from 28 Chinese provinces from 2005 to 2021. The PSTR model can solve the problem of minimizing potential outliers ignored in the previous literature, while taking into account the endogeneity and heterogeneity of the model and obtaining more reliable results. According to the findings, financial development has a nonlinear effect on carbon dioxide emissions. Furthermore, the positive effect of financial development on carbon dioxide emissions occurs via the scale and structural effects, while the negative effect occurs via the technological effect, which takes up more space. Moreover, financial added value and the financial scale demonstrate a smooth transition, while financial efficiency and foreign direct investment demonstrate a positive influence.