Multimodal analysis of cortical activation in young male adults with internet gaming disorder: A resting state EEG-fNIRS study.

BACKGROUND: Internet gaming disorder (IGD) has become increasingly prevalent worldwide and is recognized as a significant public health concern because of its negative consequences on individuals mental and physical health, social relationships, academic performance and overall well-being. While research on IGD has gained significant momentum in the past decade, the neural substrates underlying this disorder remains unclear. This study aims to investigate resting-state cortical activation in male subjects with IGD using a concurrent functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and electroencephalography (EEG) hybrid system. METHODS: Twenty-two male individuals with IGD (18-23 years old) and twenty-two male healthy, age-matched healthy controls were included in the study. Mean oxygenation of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and whole head neural activity were measured using fNIRS and EEG respectively, during eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions at the resting state. EEG signals were decomposed into distinct frequency sub-bands with wavelet transform, followed by the analysis of the power spectral density within each band. Mean oxygenation of PFC is measured using a multichannel fNIRS system. RESULTS: Results revealed that the individuals with IGD had significantly higher beta power in the frontal region compared to the control group. Individuals with IGD showed significantly increased PFC oxygenation compared to healthy controls. Additionally, both frontal beta power and PFC oxygenation were significantly correlated with IGD severity. However, there were no significant correlations observed between oxygenation and beta powers. CONCLUSION: This study is the first to examine resting-state cortical activation using multimodal EEG-fNIRS system in young adults with IGD. Moreover, it provides an important contribution to the understanding of the underlying neural mechanisms of IGD and offer new insights for the diagnosis and intervention of the disorder using multimodal EEG-fNIRS system. Further studies should aim to replicate the findings of this study using a larger and more culturally diverse sample to support the neurophysiological basis of IGD.

Evaluation of Emotions from Brain Signals on 3D VAD Space via Artificial Intelligence Techniques.

Recent achievements have made emotion studies a rising field contributing to many areas, such as health technologies, brain-computer interfaces, psychology, etc. Emotional states can be evaluated in valence, arousal, and dominance (VAD) domains. Most of the work uses only VA due to the easiness of differentiation; however, very few studies use VAD like this study. Similarly, segment comparisons of emotion analysis with handcrafted features also use VA space. At this point, we primarily focused on VAD space to evaluate emotions and segmentations. The DEAP dataset is used in this study. A comprehensive analytical approach is implemented with two sub-studies: first, segmentation (Segments I-VIII), and second, binary cross-comparisons and evaluations of eight emotional states, in addition to comparisons of selected segments (III, IV, and V), class separation levels (5, 4-6, and 3-7), and unbalanced and balanced data with SMOTE. In both sub-studies, Wavelet Transform is applied to electroencephalography signals to separate the brain waves into their bands (α, ß, γ, and θ bands), twenty-four attributes are extracted, and Sequential Minimum Optimization, K-Nearest Neighbors, Fuzzy Unordered Rule Induction Algorithm, Random Forest, Optimized Forest, Bagging, Random Committee, and Random Subspace are used for classification. In our study, we have obtained high accuracy results, which can be seen in the figures in the second part. The best accuracy result in this study for unbalanced data is obtained for Low Arousal-Low Valence-High Dominance and High Arousal-High Valence-Low Dominance emotion comparisons (Segment III and 4.5-5.5 class separation), and an accuracy rate of 98.94% is obtained with the IBk classifier. Data-balanced results mostly seem to outperform unbalanced results.

Evaluation of divided attention using different stimulation models in event-related potentials.

Divided attention is defined as focusing on different tasks at once, and this is described as one of the biggest problems of today's society. Default examinations for understanding attention are questionnaires or physiological signals, like evoked potentials and electroencephalography. Physiological records were obtained using visual, auditory, and auditory-visual stimuli combinations with 48 participants-18-25-year-old university students-to find differences between sustained and divided attention. A Fourier-based filter was used to get a 0.01-30-Hz frequency band. Fractal dimensions, entropy values, power spectral densities, and Hjorth parameters from electroencephalography and P300 components from evoked potentials were calculated as features. To decrease the size of the feature set, some features, which yield less detail level for data, were eliminated. The visual and auditory stimuli in selective attention were compared with the divided attention state, and the best accuracy was found to be 88.89% on a support vector machine with linear kernel. As a result, it was seen that divided attention could be more difficult to determine from selective attention, but successful classification could be obtained with appropriate methods. Contrary to literature, the study deals with the infrastructure of attention types by working on a completely healthy and attention-high group. Graphical abstract.