Unveiling perinatal depression: A dual-network EEG analysis for diagnosis and severity assessment.

Perinatal depression (PD), which affects about 10-20 percent of women, often goes unnoticed because related symptoms frequently overlap with those commonly experienced during pregnancy. Moreover, identifying PD currently depends heavily on the use of questionnaires, and objective biological indicators for diagnosis has yet to be identified. This research proposes a safe and non-invasive method for diagnosing PD and aims to delve deeper into its underlying mechanism. Considering the non-invasiveness and clinical convenience of electroencephalogram (EEG) for mothers-to-be and fetuses, we collected the resting-state scalp EEG of pregnant women (with PD/healthy) at the 38th week of gestation. To compensate for the low spatial resolution of scalp EEG, source analysis was first applied to project the scalp EEG to the cortical-space. Afterwards, cortical-space networks and large-scale networks were constructed to investigate the mechanism of PD from two different level. Herein, differences in the two distinct types of networks between PD patients and healthy mothers-to-be were explored, respectively. We found that the PD patients illustrated decreased network connectivity in the cortical-space, while the large-scale networks revealed weaker connections at cerebellar area. Further, related spatial topological features derived from the two different networks were combined to promote the recognition of pregnant women with PD from those healthy ones. Meanwhile, the depression severity at patient level was effectively predicted based on the combined spatial topological features as well. These findings consistently validated that the two kinds of networks indeed played off each other, which thus helped explore the underlying mechanism of PD; and further verified the superiority of the combination strategy, revealing its reliability and potential in diagnosis and depression severity evaluation.

An automated approach for predicting HAMD-17 scores via divergent selective focused multi-heads self-attention network.

This study introduces the Divergent Selective Focused Multi-heads Self-Attention Network (DSFMANet), an innovative deep learning model devised to automatically predict Hamilton Depression Rating Scale-17 (HAMD-17) scores in patients with depression. This model introduces a multi-branch structure for sub-bands and artificially configures attention focus factors on various branches, resulting in distinct attention distributions for different sub-bands. Experimental results demonstrate that when DSFMANet processes sub-band data, its performance surpasses current benchmarks in key metrics such as mean square error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), and coefficient of determination (R2). This success is particularly evident in terms of MSE and MAE, where the performance of sub-band data is significantly superior, highlighting the model's potential in accurately predicting HAMD-17 scores. Concurrently, the experiment also compared the model's performance with sub-band and full-band data, affirming the superiority of the selective focus attention mechanism in electroencephalography (EEG) signal processing. DSFMANet, when utilizing sub-band data, exhibits higher data processing efficiency and reduced model complexity. The findings of this study underscore the significance of employing deep learning models based on sub-band analysis in depression diagnosis. The DSFMANet model not only effectively enhances the accuracy of depression diagnosis but also offers valuable research directions for similar applications in the future. This deep learning-based automated approach can effectively ascertain the HAMD-17 scores of patients with depression, thus offering more accurate and reliable support for clinical decision-making.

Evaluating the depression state during perinatal period by non-invasive scalp EEG.

Perinatal depression, with a prevalence of 10 to 20% in United States, is usually missed as multiple symptoms of perinatal depression are common in pregnant women. Worse, the diagnosis of perinatal depression still largely relies on questionnaires, leaving the objective biomarker being unveiled yet. This study suggested a safe and non-invasive technique to diagnose perinatal depression and further explore its underlying mechanism. Considering the non-invasiveness and clinical convenience of electroencephalogram for mothers-to-be and fetuses, we collected the resting-state electroencephalogram of pregnant women at the 38th week of gestation. Subsequently, the difference in network topology between perinatal depression patients and healthy mothers-to-be was explored, with related spatial patterns being adopted to achieve the classification of pregnant women with perinatal depression from those healthy ones. We found that the perinatal depression patients had decreased brain network connectivity, which indexed impaired efficiency of information processing. By adopting the spatial patterns, the perinatal depression could be accurately recognized with an accuracy of 87.88%; meanwhile, the depression severity at the individual level was effectively predicted, as well. These findings consistently illustrated that the resting-state electroencephalogram network could be a reliable tool for investigating the depression state across pregnant women, and will further facilitate the clinical diagnosis of perinatal depression.

Resting-state network predicts the decision-making behaviors of the proposer during the ultimatum game.

Objective. The decision-making behavior of the proposer is a key factor in achieving effective and equitable maintenance of social resources, particularly in economic interactions, and thus understanding the neurocognitive basis of the proposer's decision-making is a crucial issue. Yet the neural substrate of the proposer's decision behavior, especially from the resting-state network perspective, remains unclear.Approach. In this study, we investigated the relationship between the resting-state network and decision proposals and further established a multivariable model to predict the proposers' unfair offer rates in the ultimatum game.Main results.The results indicated the unfair offer rates of proposers are significantly related to the resting-state frontal-occipital and frontal-parietal connectivity in the delta band, as well as the network properties. And compared to the conservative decision group (low unfair offer rate), the risk decision group (high unfair offer rate) exhibited stronger resting-state long-range linkages. Finally, the established multivariable model did accurately predict the unfair offer rates of the proposers, along with a correlation coefficient of 0.466 between the actual and predicted behaviors.Significance. Together, these findings demonstrated that related resting-state frontal-occipital and frontal-parietal connectivity may serve as a dispositional indicator of the risky behaviors for the proposers and subsequently predict a highly complex decision-making behavior, which contributed to the development of artificial intelligence decision-making system with biological characteristics as well.

Frequency-specific directed interactions between whole-brain regions during sentence processing using multimodal stimulus.

Neural oscillations subserve a broad range of speech processing and language comprehension functions. Using an electroencephalogram (EEG), we investigated the frequency-specific directed interactions between whole-brain regions while the participants processed Chinese sentences using different modality stimuli (i.e., auditory, visual, and audio-visual). The results indicate that low-frequency responses correspond to the process of information flow aggregation in primary sensory cortices in different modalities. Information flow dominated by high-frequency responses exhibited characteristics of bottom-up flow from left posterior temporal to left frontal regions. The network pattern of top-down information flowing out of the left frontal lobe was presented by the joint dominance of low- and high-frequency rhythms. Overall, our results suggest that the brain may be modality-independent when processing higher-order language information.

Transcriptomic and Macroscopic Architectures of Multimodal Covariance Network Reveal Molecular-Structural-Functional Co-alterations.

Human cognition is usually underpinned by intrinsic structure and functional neural co-activation in spatially distributed brain regions. Owing to lacking an effective approach to quantifying the covarying of structure and functional responses, how the structural-functional circuits interact and how genes encode the relationships, to deepen our knowledge of human cognition and disease, are still unclear. Here, we propose a multimodal covariance network (MCN) construction approach to capture interregional covarying of the structural skeleton and transient functional activities for a single individual. We further explored the potential association between brain-wide gene expression patterns and structural-functional covarying in individuals involved in a gambling task and individuals with major depression disorder (MDD), adopting multimodal data from a publicly available human brain transcriptomic atlas and 2 independent cohorts. MCN analysis showed a replicable cortical structural-functional fine map in healthy individuals, and the expression of cognition- and disease phenotype-related genes was found to be spatially correlated with the corresponding MCN differences. Further analysis of cell type-specific signature genes suggests that the excitatory and inhibitory neuron transcriptomic changes could account for most of the observed correlation with task-evoked MCN differences. In contrast, changes in MCN of MDD patients were enriched for biological processes related to synapse function and neuroinflammation in astrocytes, microglia, and neurons, suggesting its promising application in developing targeted therapies for MDD patients. Collectively, these findings confirmed the correlations of MCN-related differences with brain-wide gene expression patterns, which captured genetically validated structural-functional differences at the cellular level in specific cognitive processes and psychiatric patients.

Information transmission velocity-based dynamic hierarchical brain networks.

The brain functions as an accurate circuit that regulates information to be sequentially propagated and processed in a hierarchical manner. However, it is still unknown how the brain is hierarchically organized and how information is dynamically propagated during high-level cognition. In this study, we developed a new scheme for quantifying the information transmission velocity (ITV) by combining electroencephalogram (EEG) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), and then mapped the cortical ITV network (ITVN) to explore the information transmission mechanism of the human brain. The application in MRI-EEG data of P300 revealed bottom-up and top-down ITVN interactions subserving P300 generation, which was comprised of four hierarchical modules. Among these four modules, information exchange between visual- and attention-activated regions occurred at a high velocity, related cognitive processes could thus be efficiently accomplished due to the heavy myelination of these regions. Moreover, inter-individual variability in P300 was probed to be attributed to the difference in information transmission efficiency of the brain, which may provide new insight into the cognitive degenerations in clinical neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease, from the transmission velocity perspective. Together, these findings confirm the capacity of ITV to effectively determine the efficiency of information propagation in the brain.

Predicting the long-term after-effects of rTMS in autism spectrum disorder using temporal variability analysis of scalp EEG.

Objective.Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) emerges as a useful therapy for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) clinically. Whereas the mechanisms of action of rTMS on ASD are not fully understood, and no biomarkers until now are available to reliably predict the follow-up rTMS efficacy in clinical practice.Approach.In the current work, the temporal variability was investigated in resting-state electroencephalogram of ASD patients, and the nonlinear complexity of related time-varying networks was accordingly evaluated by fuzzy entropy.Main results.The results showed the hyper-variability in the resting-state networks of ASD patients, while three week rTMS treatment alleviates the hyper fluctuations occurring in the frontal-parietal and frontal-occipital connectivity and further contributes to the ameliorative ASD symptoms. In addition, the changes in variability network properties are closely correlated with clinical scores, which further serve as potential predictors to reliably track the long-term rTMS efficacy for ASD.Significance.The findings consistently demonstrated that the temporal variability of time-varying networks of ASD patients could be modulated by rTMS, and related variability properties also help predict follow-up rTMS efficacy, which provides the potential for formulating individualized treatment strategies for ASD (ChiCTR2000033586).

Electroencephalographic Network Topologies Predict Antidepressant Responses in Patients With Major Depressive Disorder.

Medication therapy seems to be an effective treatment for major depressive disorder (MDD). However, although the efficacies of various medicines are equal or similar on average, they vary widely among individuals. Therefore, an understanding of methods for the timely evaluation of short-term therapeutic response and prediction of symptom improvement after a specific course of medication at the individual level at the initial stage of treatment is very important. In our present study, we sought to identify a neurobiological signature of the response to short-term antidepressant treatment. Related brain network analysis was applied in resting-state electroencephalogram (EEG) datasets from patients with MDD. The corresponding EEG networks were constructed accordingly and then quantitatively measured to predict the efficacy after eight weeks of medication, as well as to distinguish the therapeutic responders from non-responders. The results of our present study revealed that the corresponding resting-state EEG networks became significantly weaker after one week of treatment, and the eventual medication efficacy was reliably predicted using the changes in those network properties within the one-week medication regimen. Moreover, the corresponding resting-state networks at baseline were also proven to precisely distinguish those responders from other individuals with an accuracy of 96.67% when using the spatial network topologies as the discriminative features. These findings consistently provide a deeper neurobiological understanding of antidepressant treatment and a reliable and quantitative approach for personalized treatment of MDD.

Auditory Dominance in Processing Chinese Semantic Abnormalities in Response to Competing Audio-visual Stimuli.

Language is a remarkable cognitive ability that can be expressed through visual (written language) or auditory (spoken language) modalities. When visual characters and auditory speech convey conflicting information, individuals may selectively attend to either one of them. However, the dominant modality in such a competing situation and the neural mechanism underlying it are still unclear. Here, we presented participants with Chinese sentences in which the visual characters and auditory speech convey conflicting information, while behavioral and electroencephalographic (EEG) responses were recorded. Results showed a prominent auditory dominance when audio-visual competition occurred. Specifically, higher accuracy (ACC), larger N400 amplitudes and more linkages in the posterior occipital-parietal areas were demonstrated in the auditory mismatch condition compared to that in the visual mismatch condition. Our research illustrates the superiority of the auditory speech over the visual characters, extending our understanding of the neural mechanisms of audio-visual competition in Chinese.

The Task-Dependent Modular Covariance Networks Unveiled by Multiple-Way Fusion-Based Analysis.

Cognitive processes induced by the specific task are underpinned by intrinsic anatomical structures with functional neural activation patterns. However, current covariance network analysis still pays much attention to brain morphologies or baseline activity due to the lack of an effective method for capturing the structural-functional covarying during tasks. Here, a multimodal covariance network (MCN) construction method was proposed to identify inter-regional covariations of the structural skeleton and functional activities by simultaneous magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalogram (EEG). Results from two independent cohorts confirmed that MCNs could capture cognition-specific hierarchical modules in joint comprehensive multimodal features well, especially when time-resolved EEG was further integrated. The quantitative evaluation further demonstrates significantly larger modularity of MCN integrating fine-grained features from EEG. The application to the discovery cohort identified prominent modular covarying across the default mode and salience networks at rest, while the visual oddball task was accomplished by synchronous structural-functional cooperation within networks associated with attention control and working memory updating. Strikingly, the results of an external validation cohort showed a different covariant pattern corresponding to decision-specific cognitive modules. Overall, the results suggested that multimodal covariance analysis provides a reliable definition of multistate neural cognitive networks, further discloses modular-specific structural and functional co-variation.

Dynamic corticomuscular multi-regional modulations during finger movement revealed by time-varying network analysis.

Objective.A body movement involves the complicated information exchange between the central and peripheral systems, which is characterized by the dynamical coupling patterns between the multiple brain areas and multiple muscle units. How the central and peripheral nerves coordinate multiple internal brain regions and muscle groups is very important when accomplishing the action.Approach.In this study, we extend the adaptive directed transfer function to construct the time-varying networks between multiple corticomuscular regions, and divided the movement duration into different stages by the time-varying corticomuscular network patterns.Main results.The inter dynamical corticomuscular network demonstrated the different interaction patterns between the central and peripheral systems during the different hand movement stages. The muscles transmit bottom-up movement information in the preparation stage, but the brain issues top-down control commands and dominates in the execution stage, and finally the brain's dominant advantage gradually weakens in the relaxation stage. When classifying the different movement stages based on time-varying corticomuscular network indicators, an average accuracy above 74% could be reliably achieved.Significance.The findings of this study help deepen our knowledge of central-peripheral nerve pathways and coordination mechanisms, and also provide opportunities for monitoring and regulating movement disorders.

Corrections to "Identification of the General Anesthesia Induced Loss of Consciousness by Cross Fuzzy Entropy-Based Brain Network".

In the above article [1], to track the loss of consciousness (LOC) induced by general anesthesia (GA), we first developed the multi-channel cross fuzzy entropy method to construct the time- varying networks, whose temporal fluctuations were then explored and quantitatively evaluated. Since time-varying network topologies were found to fluctuate from long-range frontal-occipital to short-range prefrontal-frontal connectivity during the LOC period, a new parameter, i.e., the long-range connectivity (LRC) that measured the number of frontal-occipital connectivity, was accordingly calculated and then investigated between the coherence (COH) and cross fuzzy entropy (C-FuzzyEn) approaches, as displayed in Fig. 1. The distinct time-varying fluctuations of both approaches were indeed found within this period, where only C-FuzzyEn effectively captured the consciousness fluctuation induced by the GA.

Identification of the General Anesthesia Induced Loss of Consciousness by Cross Fuzzy Entropy-Based Brain Network.

Although the spatiotemporal complexity and network connectivity are clarified to be disrupted during the general anesthesia (GA) induced unconsciousness, it remains to be difficult to exactly monitor the fluctuation of consciousness clinically. In this study, to track the loss of consciousness (LOC) induced by GA, we first developed the multi-channel cross fuzzy entropy method to construct the time-varying networks, whose temporal fluctuations were then explored and quantitatively evaluated. Thereafter, an algorithm was further proposed to detect the time onset at which patients lost their consciousness. The results clarified during the resting state, relatively stable fuzzy fluctuations in multi-channel network architectures and properties were found; by contrast, during the LOC period, the disrupted frontal-occipital connectivity occurred at the early stage, while at the later stage, the inner-frontal connectivity was identified. When specifically exploring the early LOC stage, the uphill of the clustering coefficients and the downhill of the characteristic path length were found, which might help resolve the propofol-induced consciousness fluctuation in patients. Moreover, the developed detection algorithm was validated to have great capacity in exactly capturing the time point (in seconds) at which patients lost consciousness. The findings demonstrated that the time-varying cross-fuzzy networks help decode the GA and are of great significance for developing anesthesia depth monitoring technology clinically.

Recognition of general anesthesia-induced loss of consciousness based on the spatial pattern of the brain networks.

Objective.Unconsciousness is a key feature related to general anesthesia (GA) but is difficult to be evaluated accurately by anesthesiologists clinically.Approach.To tracking the loss of consciousness (LOC) and recovery of consciousness (ROC) under GA, in this study, by investigating functional connectivity of the scalp electroencephalogram, we explore any potential difference in brain networks among anesthesia induction, anesthesia recovery, and the resting state.Main results.The results of this study demonstrated significant differences among the three periods, concerning the corresponding brain networks. In detail, the suppressed default mode network, as well as the prolonged characteristic path length and decreased clustering coefficient, during LOC was found in the alpha band, compared to the Resting and the ROC state. When to further identify the Resting and LOC states, the fused network topologies and properties achieved the highest accuracy of 95%, along with a sensitivity of 93.33% and a specificity of 96.67%.Significance.The findings of this study not only deepen our understanding of propofol-induced unconsciousness but also provide quantitative measurements subserving better anesthesia management.

Separated Channel Attention Convolutional Neural Network (SC-CNN-Attention) to Identify ADHD in Multi-Site Rs-fMRI Dataset.

The accurate identification of an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) subject has remained a challenge for both neuroscience research and clinical diagnosis. Unfortunately, the traditional methods concerning the classification model and feature extraction usually depend on the single-channel model and static measurements (i.e., functional connectivity, FC) in the small, homogenous single-site dataset, which is limited and may cause the loss of intrinsic information in functional MRI (fMRI). In this study, we proposed a new two-stage network structure by combing a separated channel convolutional neural network (SC-CNN) with an attention-based network (SC-CNN-attention) to discriminate ADHD and healthy controls on a large-scale multi-site database (5 sites and n = 1019). To utilize both intrinsic temporal feature and the interactions of temporal dependent in whole-brain resting-state fMRI, in the first stage of our proposed network structure, a SC- CNN is used to learn the temporal feature of each brain region, and an attention network in the second stage is adopted to capture temporal dependent features among regions and extract fusion features. Using a "leave-one-site-out" cross-validation framework, our proposed method obtained a mean classification accuracy of 68.6% on five different sites, which is higher than those reported in previous studies. The classification results demonstrate that our proposed network is robust to data variants and is also replicated across sites. The combination of the SC-CNN with the attention network is powerful to capture the intrinsic fMRI information to discriminate ADHD across multi-site resting-state fMRI data.

Linear polarization distinguishing metalens in visible wavelength.

A emerging optical metasurface has raised wide interest due to its planar structure and unprecedented control of light through subwavelength nano structures. In this study, we propose a novel metalens that integrates the function of a concentrating lens and linear polarizer. For this lens, focus can only be formed under the incidence of designed linear polarization, and its focusing effect is significantly suppressed upon the incidence of the orthogonal polarization. The linear polarization distinguishing focus characteristic is from the special design of anisotropic subwavelength phase shifters with two functionalities. One is the space-variant polarization distinguishing phase profile achieved through the engineering of a three-dimensional anisotropic phase shifter structure. The other is the selective generation of scattering loss on the incidence of its orthorgonal polarization. The linear polarization distinguishing metalens is fabricated through a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor compatible nano fabrication process, and its performance is demonstrated through both simulation and experiment.

Autoregressive model in the Lp norm space for EEG analysis.

The autoregressive (AR) model is widely used in electroencephalogram (EEG) analyses such as waveform fitting, spectrum estimation, and system identification. In real applications, EEGs are inevitably contaminated with unexpected outlier artifacts, and this must be overcome. However, most of the current AR models are based on the L2 norm structure, which exaggerates the outlier effect due to the square property of the L2 norm. In this paper, a novel AR object function is constructed in the Lp (p≤1) norm space with the aim to compress the outlier effects on EEG analysis, and a fast iteration procedure is developed to solve this new AR model. The quantitative evaluation using simulated EEGs with outliers proves that the proposed Lp (p≤1) AR can estimate the AR parameters more robustly than the Yule-Walker, Burg and LS methods, under various simulated outlier conditions. The actual application to the resting EEG recording with ocular artifacts also demonstrates that Lp (p≤1) AR can effectively address the outliers and recover a resting EEG power spectrum that is more consistent with its physiological basis.

Long-term effects of musical training and functional plasticity in salience system.

Musicians undergoing long-term musical training show improved emotional and cognitive function, which suggests the presence of neuroplasticity. The structural and functional impacts of the human brain have been observed in musicians. In this study, we used data-driven functional connectivity analysis to map local and distant functional connectivity in resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data from 28 professional musicians and 28 nonmusicians. Compared with nonmusicians, musicians exhibited significantly greater local functional connectivity density in 10 regions, including the bilateral dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula, and anterior temporoparietal junction. A distant functional connectivity analysis demonstrated that most of these regions were included in salience system, which is associated with high-level cognitive control and fundamental attentional process. Additionally, musicians had significantly greater functional integration in this system, especially for connections to the left insula. Increased functional connectivity between the left insula and right temporoparietal junction may be a response to long-term musical training. Our findings indicate that the improvement of salience network is involved in musical training. The salience system may represent a new avenue for exploration regarding the underlying foundations of enhanced higher-level cognitive processes in musicians.

Probabilistic diffusion tractography reveals improvement of structural network in musicians.

PURPOSE: Musicians experience a large amount of information transfer and integration of complex sensory, motor, and auditory processes when training and playing musical instruments. Therefore, musicians are a useful model in which to investigate neural adaptations in the brain. METHODS: Here, based on diffusion-weighted imaging, probabilistic tractography was used to determine the architecture of white matter anatomical networks in musicians and non-musicians. Furthermore, the features of the white matter networks were analyzed using graph theory. RESULTS: Small-world properties of the white matter network were observed in both groups. Compared with non-musicians, the musicians exhibited significantly increased connectivity strength in the left and right supplementary motor areas, the left calcarine fissure and surrounding cortex and the right caudate nucleus, as well as a significantly larger weighted clustering coefficient in the right olfactory cortex, the left medial superior frontal gyrus, the right gyrus rectus, the left lingual gyrus, the left supramarginal gyrus, and the right pallidum. Furthermore, there were differences in the node betweenness centrality in several regions. However, no significant differences in topological properties were observed at a global level. CONCLUSIONS: We illustrated preliminary findings to extend the network level understanding of white matter plasticity in musicians who have had long-term musical training. These structural, network-based findings may indicate that musicians have enhanced information transmission efficiencies in local white matter networks that are related to musical training.