Alterations in structural integrity of superior longitudinal fasciculus III associated with cognitive performance in cerebral small vessel disease.

BACKGROUND: This study aimed to investigate the alterations in structural integrity of superior longitudinal fasciculus subcomponents with increasing white matter hyperintensity severity as well as the relationship to cognitive performance in cerebral small vessel disease. METHODS: 110 cerebral small vessel disease study participants with white matter hyperintensities were recruited. According to Fazekas grade scale, white matter hyperintensities of each subject were graded. All subjects were divided into two groups. The probabilistic fiber tracking method was used for analyzing microstructure characteristics of superior longitudinal fasciculus subcomponents. RESULTS: Probabilistic fiber tracking results showed that mean diffusion, radial diffusion, and axial diffusion values of the left arcuate fasciculus as well as the mean diffusion value of the right arcuate fasciculus and left superior longitudinal fasciculus III in high white matter hyperintensities rating group were significantly higher than those in low white matter hyperintensities rating group (p < 0.05). The mean diffusion value of the left superior longitudinal fasciculus III was negatively related to the Montreal Cognitive Assessment score of study participants (p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: The structural integrity injury of bilateral arcuate fasciculus and left superior longitudinal fasciculus III is more severe with the aggravation of white matter hyperintensities. The structural integrity injury of the left superior longitudinal fasciculus III correlates to cognitive impairment in cerebral small vessel disease.

4D attention-based neural network for EEG emotion recognition.

Electroencephalograph (EEG) emotion recognition is a significant task in the brain-computer interface field. Although many deep learning methods are proposed recently, it is still challenging to make full use of the information contained in different domains of EEG signals. In this paper, we present a novel method, called four-dimensional attention-based neural network (4D-aNN) for EEG emotion recognition. First, raw EEG signals are transformed into 4D spatial-spectral-temporal representations. Then, the proposed 4D-aNN adopts spectral and spatial attention mechanisms to adaptively assign the weights of different brain regions and frequency bands, and a convolutional neural network (CNN) is utilized to deal with the spectral and spatial information of the 4D representations. Moreover, a temporal attention mechanism is integrated into a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to explore temporal dependencies of the 4D representations. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performances on both DEAP, SEED and SEED-IV datasets under intra-subject splitting. The experimental results have shown the effectiveness of the attention mechanisms in different domains for EEG emotion recognition.