The Estimation of Cortical Connectivity: New Methodologies and Applications

Dear Colleagues,

In the last two decades, a major shift in the scientific discussions of neuroscience have involved a progressive focus on the concept of “brain networks” instead of the concept of “brain regions”. In fact, while the “brain regions” concept dominated the development of the neuroscience field from the 1950s to the beginning of the 1990s, the “brain networks” concept has only recently gained popularity and interest among researchers. This shift was aided by the large availability of data related to brain activity simultaneously sampled from multiple brain locations by magnetoencephalography (MEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or high-resolution EEG (hr-EEG).

An immediate consequence of the concept of “brain network” as a basic unit of behavior is the fact that different brain regions could actively participate in several concurrently active networks. Thus, the individuation of the particular “brain networks” from the gathered brain hemodynamic and/or neuroelectric/magnetic data has become an increasingly important area of study in neuroscience. Consequently, in neuroscience, the importance of methodologies aiming to study the statistical relations between multiple time series has increased.

The way in which the “task-related connections” between brain regions could be estimated based on the collected brain hemodynamic and/or neuroelectric data has been defined as “functional connectivity”. It is worth noting that “functional connectivity” is a data-driven estimation of the possible joint state of different brain regions.

Many functional connectivity methodologies have been derived in recent years to deal with the multivariate brain activity time series gathered from MEG, fMRI, and hr-EEG devices.

This Special Issue of Brain Science aims to present the state of the art in research on the estimation and/or application of functional connectivity techniques by research groups very active in this specific field of investigation.

The idea is to collect papers related to the methodologic estimation of cortical connectivity from multivariate time series of neurophysiologic signals (EEG, MEG, fNIRS, fMRI) as well as to the application of cortical connectivity estimates in different clinical and working environments in humans.

An example of the research areas on which we are soliciting papers is provided below:

• Brain–computer interfaces—functional connectivity developments and application to patients and normal subjects for neurorehabilitation, domotics, gaming, and entertainment;
• Functional connectivity analysis of neuroelectromagnetic activity in cognitive tasks;
• Estimation of EEG connectivity in pharmaco-EEG in humans;
• Methods for the connectivity analysis of EEG or MEG data from patients in relevant clinical contexts (e.g., data from cochlear-implanted patients or from deep brain stimulations);
• Methods for connectivity analysis of EEG or MEG data from normal subjects or patients in challenging contexts (driving car, airplanes, monitoring, video surveillance, etc.).

However, this is just a sample of possible contributions and is not an exhaustive list of topics. Please contact the Editors of this Special Issue with any pre-submission enquiries.

Dr. Giulia Cartocci
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• EEG
• MEG
• fMRI
• fNIRS
• cognitive systems
• PDC
• DTF
• coherence