Cognitive impairment measured by event-related potentials during early and late postoperative period following intravenous or inhalation anaesthesia.

OBJECTIVE: This study investigated modification in cognitive function following inhalation (IA) and total intravenous (TIVA) anaesthesia measured using auditory ERPs (Event Related Potentials). METHODS: Auditory ERPs examination with N1, P3a and P3b component registration was carried out one day before surgery (D-1) and on the first (D+1), sixth (D+6) and 42nd (D+42) days after surgery. Results were compared between two anaesthetic groups. RESULTS: On D+1, N1 latency was increased in the IA group. A significant reduction was observed in amplitude of the P3a component on D+6, which persisted up to D+42 for both IA and TIVA groups. A reduction in the amplitude of P3b on D+1 with normalization by D+6 was found in both groups as well. CONCLUSIONS: Intravenous and inhalation anaesthesia lead to similar changes in cognitive function as determined by ERPs, both during the early and late postoperative periods. It cannot be clearly confirmed whether the observed effects are due to anaesthesia or other unmonitored perioperative factors. SIGNIFICANCE: Post anaesthetic changes represent a subclinical impairment; nevertheless, they represent a potential risk for subsequent development of cognitive difficulties.

Stacked Autoencoders for the P300 Component Detection.

Novel neural network training methods (commonly referred to as deep learning) have emerged in recent years. Using a combination of unsupervised pre-training and subsequent fine-tuning, deep neural networks have become one of the most reliable classification methods. Since deep neural networks are especially powerful for high-dimensional and non-linear feature vectors, electroencephalography (EEG) and event-related potentials (ERPs) are one of the promising applications. Furthermore, to the authors' best knowledge, there are very few papers that study deep neural networks for EEG/ERP data. The aim of the experiments subsequently presented was to verify if deep learning-based models can also perform well for single trial P300 classification with possible application to P300-based brain-computer interfaces. The P300 data used were recorded in the EEG/ERP laboratory at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of West Bohemia, and are publicly available. Stacked autoencoders (SAEs) were implemented and compared with some of the currently most reliable state-of-the-art methods, such as LDA and multi-layer perceptron (MLP). The parameters of stacked autoencoders were optimized empirically. The layers were inserted one by one and at the end, the last layer was replaced by a supervised softmax classifier. Subsequently, fine-tuning using backpropagation was performed. The architecture of the neural network was 209-130-100-50-20-2. The classifiers were trained on a dataset merged from four subjects and subsequently tested on different 11 subjects without further training. The trained SAE achieved 69.2% accuracy that was higher (p < 0.01) than the accuracy of MLP (64.9%) and LDA (65.9%). The recall of 58.8% was slightly higher when compared with MLP (56.2%) and LDA (58.4%). Therefore, SAEs could be preferable to other state-of-the-art classifiers for high-dimensional event-related potential feature vectors.

Developmental coordination disorder in children - experimental work and data annotation.

Background: Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) is described as a motor skill disorder characterized by a marked impairment in the development of motor coordination abilities that significantly interferes with performance of daily activities and/or academic achievement. Since some electrophysiological studies suggest differences between children with/without motor development problems, we prepared an experimental protocol and performed electrophysiological experiments with the aim of making a step toward a possible diagnosis of this disorder using the event-related potentials (ERP) technique. The second aim is to properly annotate the obtained raw data with relevant metadata and promote their long-term sustainability. Results: The data from 32 school children (16 with possible DCD and 16 in the control group) were collected. Each dataset contains raw electroencephalography (EEG) data in the BrainVision format and provides sufficient metadata (such as age, gender, results of the motor test, and hearing thresholds) to allow other researchers to perform analysis. For each experiment, the percentage of ERP trials damaged by blinking artifacts was estimated. Furthermore, ERP trials were averaged across different participants and conditions, and the resulting plots are included in the manuscript. This should help researchers to estimate the usability of individual datasets for analysis. Conclusions: The aim of the whole project is to find out if it is possible to make any conclusions about DCD from EEG data obtained. For the purpose of further analysis, the data were collected and annotated respecting the current outcomes of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility Program on Standards for Data Sharing, the Task Force on Electrophysiology, and the group developing the Ontology for Experimental Neurophysiology. The data with metadata are stored in the EEG/ERP Portal.

Software and hardware infrastructure for research in electrophysiology.

As in other areas of experimental science, operation of electrophysiological laboratory, design and performance of electrophysiological experiments, collection, storage and sharing of experimental data and metadata, analysis and interpretation of these data, and publication of results are time consuming activities. If these activities are well organized and supported by a suitable infrastructure, work efficiency of researchers increases significantly. This article deals with the main concepts, design, and development of software and hardware infrastructure for research in electrophysiology. The described infrastructure has been primarily developed for the needs of neuroinformatics laboratory at the University of West Bohemia, the Czech Republic. However, from the beginning it has been also designed and developed to be open and applicable in laboratories that do similar research. After introducing the laboratory and the whole architectural concept the individual parts of the infrastructure are described. The central element of the software infrastructure is a web-based portal that enables community researchers to store, share, download and search data and metadata from electrophysiological experiments. The data model, domain ontology and usage of semantic web languages and technologies are described. Current data publication policy used in the portal is briefly introduced. The registration of the portal within Neuroscience Information Framework is described. Then the methods used for processing of electrophysiological signals are presented. The specific modifications of these methods introduced by laboratory researches are summarized; the methods are organized into a laboratory workflow. Other parts of the software infrastructure include mobile and offline solutions for data/metadata storing and a hardware stimulator communicating with an EEG amplifier and recording software.