changes in eeg power spectral density and cortical connectivity in healthy and tetraplegic patients during a motor imagery task脑电图功率谱密度的变化和皮层连接在健康和瘫痪患者患者在运动图像的任务.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience Volume 2009, Article ID 279515, 12 pages doi:10.1155/2009/279515 Research Article Changes in EEG Power Spectral Density and Cortical Connectivity in Healthy and Tetraplegic Patients during a Motor Imagery Task Filippo Cona,1 Melissa Zavaglia,1 Laura Astolfi,2, 3 Fabio Babiloni,2, 3 and Mauro Ursino1 1 Department of Electronics, Computer Science and Systems, University of Bologna, Via Venezia 52, 47023 Cesena, Italy 2 Department of Human Physiology and Pharmacology, Sapienza University of Rome, 00185 Rome, Italy 3 Istituti di ricovero e cura a carattere scientifico (IRCCS) Fondazione Santa Lucia, 00179 Rome, Italy Correspondence should be addressed to Mauro Ursino, mauro.ursino@unibo.it Received 12 December 2008; Accepted 8 April 2009 Recommended by Andrzej Cichocki Knowledge of brain connectivity is an important aspect of modern neuroscience, to understand how the brain realizes its functions. In this work, neural mass models including four groups of excitatory and inhibitory neurons are used to estimate the connectivity among three cortical regions of interests (ROIs) during a foot-movement task. Real data were obtained via high-resolution scalp EEGs on two populations: healthy volunteers and tetraplegic patients. A 3-shell Boundary Element Model of the head was used to estimate the cortical current density and to derive cortical EEGs in the three ROIs. The model assumes that each ROI can generate an intrinsic rhythm in the beta range, and receives rhythms in the alpha and gamma ranges from other two regions. Connectivity strengths among the ROIs were estimated by means of an original genetic algorithm that tries to minimize several cost functions of the difference between real and model power spectral densit