Cortical folding correlates to aging and Alzheimer's Disease's cognitive and CSF biomarkers.

This manuscript presents the quantification and correlation of three aspects of Alzheimer's Disease evolution, including structural, biochemical, and cognitive assessments. We aimed to test a novel structural biomarker for neurodegeneration based on a cortical folding model for mammals. Our central hypothesis is that the cortical folding variable, representative of axonal tension in white matter, is an optimal discriminator of pathological aging and correlates with altered loadings in Cerebrospinal Fluid samples and a decline in cognition and memory. We extracted morphological features from T1w 3T MRI acquisitions using FreeSurfer from 77 Healthy Controls (age = 66 ± 8.4, 69% females), 31 Mild Cognitive Impairment (age = 72 ± 4.8, 61% females), and 13 Alzheimer's Disease patients (age = 77 ± 6.1, 62% females) of recruited volunteers in Brazil to test its discriminative power using optimal cut-point analysis. Cortical folding distinguishes the groups with reasonable accuracy (Healthy Control-Alzheimer's Disease, accuracy = 0.82; Healthy Control-Mild Cognitive Impairment, accuracy = 0.56). Moreover, Cerebrospinal Fluid biomarkers (total Tau, A[Formula: see text]1-40, A[Formula: see text]1-42, and Lipoxin) and cognitive scores (Cognitive Index, Rey's Auditory Verbal Learning Test, Trail Making Test, Digit Span Backward) were correlated with the global neurodegeneration in MRI aiming to describe health, disease, and the transition between the two states using morphology.

Classification of Complex Emotions Using EEG and Virtual Environment: Proof of Concept and Therapeutic Implication.

During the last decades, neurofeedback training for emotional self-regulation has received significant attention from scientific and clinical communities. Most studies have investigated emotions using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), including the real-time application in neurofeedback training. However, the electroencephalogram (EEG) is a more suitable tool for therapeutic application. Our study aims at establishing a method to classify discrete complex emotions (e.g., tenderness and anguish) elicited through a near-immersive scenario that can be later used for EEG-neurofeedback. EEG-based affective computing studies have mainly focused on emotion classification based on dimensions, commonly using passive elicitation through single-modality stimuli. Here, we integrated both passive and active elicitation methods. We recorded electrophysiological data during emotion-evoking trials, combining emotional self-induction with a multimodal virtual environment. We extracted correlational and time-frequency features, including frontal-alpha asymmetry (FAA), using Complex Morlet Wavelet convolution. Thinking about future real-time applications, we performed within-subject classification using 1-s windows as samples and we applied trial-specific cross-validation. We opted for a traditional machine-learning classifier with low computational complexity and sufficient validation in online settings, the Support Vector Machine. Results of individual-based cross-validation using the whole feature sets showed considerable between-subject variability. The individual accuracies ranged from 59.2 to 92.9% using time-frequency/FAA and 62.4 to 92.4% using correlational features. We found that features of the temporal, occipital, and left-frontal channels were the most discriminative between the two emotions. Our results show that the suggested pipeline is suitable for individual-based classification of discrete emotions, paving the way for future personalized EEG-neurofeedback training.

FRIEND Engine Framework: a real time neurofeedback client-server system for neuroimaging studies.

In this methods article, we present a new implementation of a recently reported FSL-integrated neurofeedback tool, the standalone version of "Functional Real-time Interactive Endogenous Neuromodulation and Decoding" (FRIEND). We will refer to this new implementation as the FRIEND Engine Framework. The framework comprises a client-server cross-platform solution for real time fMRI and fMRI/EEG neurofeedback studies, enabling flexible customization or integration of graphical interfaces, devices, and data processing. This implementation allows a fast setup of novel plug-ins and frontends, which can be shared with the user community at large. The FRIEND Engine Framework is freely distributed for non-commercial, research purposes.

Voluntary enhancement of neural signatures of affiliative emotion using FMRI neurofeedback.

In Ridley Scott's film "Blade Runner", empathy-detection devices are employed to measure affiliative emotions. Despite recent neurocomputational advances, it is unknown whether brain signatures of affiliative emotions, such as tenderness/affection, can be decoded and voluntarily modulated. Here, we employed multivariate voxel pattern analysis and real-time fMRI to address this question. We found that participants were able to use visual feedback based on decoded fMRI patterns as a neurofeedback signal to increase brain activation characteristic of tenderness/affection relative to pride, an equally complex control emotion. Such improvement was not observed in a control group performing the same fMRI task without neurofeedback. Furthermore, the neurofeedback-driven enhancement of tenderness/affection-related distributed patterns was associated with local fMRI responses in the septohypothalamic area and frontopolar cortex, regions previously implicated in affiliative emotion. This demonstrates that humans can voluntarily enhance brain signatures of tenderness/affection, unlocking new possibilities for promoting prosocial emotions and countering antisocial behavior.