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Brain Signals Acquisition and Processing

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A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Biosensors".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 April 2021) | Viewed by 94739

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Prof. Gianluca Esposito

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Guest Editor

¹Nanyang Technological University, Singapore City, Singapore
²Affiliative Behaviour and Physiology Lab, Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento, Italy
Interests: central and peripheral nervous system; physiology; social neuroscience; fMRI; fNIRS; ECG
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Dr. Andrea Bizzego

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Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento, 38068 Trento, Italy
Interests: physiological signal processing; statistical neuroimaging; artificial intelligence; reproducibility
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We live within a context of unprecedented opportunities for brain research, with a flourishing of novel sensing technologies and methodological approaches. Technological progress has made available a new generation of neuroimaging sensors that facilitate the collection of central and peripheral nervous system signals. Furthermore, multi-modal and multi-person experimental designs have become the standard. Sensor data are more efficiently analyzed by means of novel analysis techniques, in particular based on data fusion and deep learning algorithms. To maximize the impact of the research, the advancement of the sensing technologies should be associated with the adoption of rigorous and standardized methods which favor the comparability and reproducibility of the findings.

For this Special Issue, we would like to invite authors to submit papers that focus on the comparison of the sensing technologies and on standardization of the signal processing procedures to collect and analyze central and peripheral nervous system signals. These studies should be related to the use of new technologies and technological advancements, both hardware (i.e., new sensors) or software (i.e., new methodological approaches), that are re-shaping the field of brain signals acquisition and processing.

Prof. Gianluca Esposito
Dr. Andrea Bizzego
Guest Editors

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Keywords

artificial intelligence
neuroimaging
brain signals
reproducibility
standardization
clinical application
physiological measurement

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Published Papers (12 papers)

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Editorial

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3 pages, 168 KiB

Open AccessEditorial

Acquisition and Processing of Brain Signals

by Andrea Bizzego and Gianluca Esposito

Sensors 2021, 21(19), 6492; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21196492 - 29 Sep 2021

Viewed by 2566

Abstract

We live within a context of unprecedented opportunities for brain research, with a flourishing of novel sensing technologies and methodological approaches [...] Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Brain Signals Acquisition and Processing)

Research

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15 pages, 1880 KiB

Open AccessArticle

MEG Source Localization via Deep Learning

by Dimitrios Pantazis and Amir Adler

Sensors 2021, 21(13), 4278; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21134278 - 22 Jun 2021

Cited by 19 | Viewed by 4983

Abstract

We present a deep learning solution to the problem of localization of magnetoencephalography (MEG) brain signals. The proposed deep model architectures are tuned to single and multiple time point MEG data, and can estimate varying numbers of dipole sources. Results from simulated MEG data on the cortical surface of a real human subject demonstrated improvements against the popular RAP-MUSIC localization algorithm in specific scenarios with varying SNR levels, inter-source correlation values, and number of sources. Importantly, the deep learning models had robust performance to forward model errors resulting from head translation and rotation and a significant reduction in computation time, to a fraction of 1 ms, paving the way to real-time MEG source localization. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Brain Signals Acquisition and Processing)

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19 pages, 3969 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Analysis of Default Mode Network in Social Anxiety Disorder: EEG Resting-State Effective Connectivity Study

by Abdulhakim Al-Ezzi, Nidal Kamel, Ibrahima Faye and Esther Gunaseli

Sensors 2021, 21(12), 4098; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21124098 - 15 Jun 2021

Cited by 21 | Viewed by 8227

Abstract

Recent brain imaging findings by using different methods (e.g., fMRI and PET) have suggested that social anxiety disorder (SAD) is correlated with alterations in regional or network-level brain function. However, due to many limitations associated with these methods, such as poor temporal resolution and limited number of samples per second, neuroscientists could not quantify the fast dynamic connectivity of causal information networks in SAD. In this study, SAD-related changes in brain connections within the default mode network (DMN) were investigated using eight electroencephalographic (EEG) regions of interest. Partial directed coherence (PDC) was used to assess the causal influences of DMN regions on each other and indicate the changes in the DMN effective network related to SAD severity. The DMN is a large-scale brain network basically composed of the mesial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC)/precuneus, and lateral parietal cortex (LPC). The EEG data were collected from 88 subjects (22 control, 22 mild, 22 moderate, 22 severe) and used to estimate the effective connectivity between DMN regions at different frequency bands: delta (1–3 Hz), theta (4–8 Hz), alpha (8–12 Hz), low beta (13–21 Hz), and high beta (22–30 Hz). Among the healthy control (HC) and the three considered levels of severity of SAD, the results indicated a higher level of causal interactions for the mild and moderate SAD groups than for the severe and HC groups. Between the control and the severe SAD groups, the results indicated a higher level of causal connections for the control throughout all the DMN regions. We found significant increases in the mean PDC in the delta (p = 0.009) and alpha (p = 0.001) bands between the SAD groups. Among the DMN regions, the precuneus exhibited a higher level of causal influence than other regions. Therefore, it was suggested to be a major source hub that contributes to the mental exploration and emotional content of SAD. In contrast to the severe group, HC exhibited higher resting-state connectivity at the mPFC, providing evidence for mPFC dysfunction in the severe SAD group. Furthermore, the total Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS) was positively correlated with the mean values of the PDC of the severe SAD group, r (22) = 0.576, p = 0.006 and negatively correlated with those of the HC group, r (22) = −0.689, p = 0.001. The reported results may facilitate greater comprehension of the underlying potential SAD neural biomarkers and can be used to characterize possible targets for further medication. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Brain Signals Acquisition and Processing)

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17 pages, 3570 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Guide to Parent-Child fNIRS Hyperscanning Data Processing and Analysis

by Trinh Nguyen, Stefanie Hoehl and Pascal Vrtička

Sensors 2021, 21(12), 4075; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21124075 - 13 Jun 2021

Cited by 37 | Viewed by 8726

Abstract

The use of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning during naturalistic interactions in parent–child dyads has substantially advanced our understanding of the neurobiological underpinnings of human social interaction. However, despite the rise of developmental hyperscanning studies over the last years, analysis procedures have not yet been standardized and are often individually developed by each research team. This article offers a guide on parent–child fNIRS hyperscanning data analysis in MATLAB and R. We provide an example dataset of 20 dyads assessed during a cooperative versus individual problem-solving task, with brain signal acquired using 16 channels located over bilateral frontal and temporo-parietal areas. We use MATLAB toolboxes Homer2 and SPM for fNIRS to preprocess the acquired brain signal data and suggest a standardized procedure. Next, we calculate interpersonal neural synchrony between dyads using Wavelet Transform Coherence (WTC) and illustrate how to run a random pair analysis to control for spurious correlations in the signal. We then use RStudio to estimate Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMM) to account for the bounded distribution of coherence values for interpersonal neural synchrony analyses. With this guide, we hope to offer advice for future parent–child fNIRS hyperscanning investigations and to enhance replicability within the field. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Brain Signals Acquisition and Processing)

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16 pages, 1743 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Comparison of Wearable and Clinical Devices for Acquisition of Peripheral Nervous System Signals

by Andrea Bizzego, Giulio Gabrieli, Cesare Furlanello and Gianluca Esposito

Sensors 2020, 20(23), 6778; https://doi.org/10.3390/s20236778 - 27 Nov 2020

Cited by 17 | Viewed by 3815

Abstract

A key access point to the functioning of the autonomic nervous system is the investigation of peripheral signals. Wearable devices (WDs) enable the acquisition and quantification of peripheral signals in a wide range of contexts, from personal uses to scientific research. WDs have lower costs and higher portability than medical-grade devices. However, the achievable data quality can be lower, and data are subject to artifacts due to body movements and data losses. It is therefore crucial to evaluate the reliability and validity of WDs before their use in research. In this study, we introduce a data analysis procedure for the assessment of WDs for multivariate physiological signals. The quality of cardiac and electrodermal activity signals is validated with a standard set of signal quality indicators. The pipeline is available as a collection of open source Python scripts based on the pyphysio package. We apply the indicators for the analysis of signal quality on data simultaneously recorded from a clinical-grade device and two WDs. The dataset provides signals of six different physiological measures collected from 18 subjects with WDs. This study indicates the need to validate the use of WDs in experimental settings for research and the importance of both technological and signal processing aspects to obtain reliable signals and reproducible results. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Brain Signals Acquisition and Processing)

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21 pages, 319 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Classification of Non-Severe Traumatic Brain Injury from Resting-State EEG Signal Using LSTM Network with ECOC-SVM

by Chi Qin Lai, Haidi Ibrahim, Aini Ismafairus Abd Hamid and Jafri Malin Abdullah

Sensors 2020, 20(18), 5234; https://doi.org/10.3390/s20185234 - 14 Sep 2020

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 3038

Abstract

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is one of the common injuries when the human head receives an impact due to an accident or fall and is one of the most frequently submitted insurance claims. However, it is often always misused when individuals attempt an insurance fraud claim by providing false medical conditions. Therefore, there is a need for an instant brain condition classification system. This study presents a novel classification architecture that can classify non-severe TBI patients and healthy subjects employing resting-state electroencephalogram (EEG) as the input, solving the immobility issue of the computed tomography (CT) scan and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The proposed architecture makes use of long short term memory (LSTM) and error-correcting output coding support vector machine (ECOC-SVM) to perform multiclass classification. The pre-processed EEG time series are supplied to the network by each time step, where important information from the previous time step will be remembered by the LSTM cell. Activations from the LSTM cell is used to train an ECOC-SVM. The temporal advantages of the EEG were amplified and able to achieve a classification accuracy of 100%. The proposed method was compared to existing works in the literature, and it is shown that the proposed method is superior in terms of classification accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and precision. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Brain Signals Acquisition and Processing)

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20 pages, 2706 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Detection of Focal and Non-Focal Electroencephalogram Signals Using Fast Walsh-Hadamard Transform and Artificial Neural Network

by Prasanna J., M. S. P. Subathra, Mazin Abed Mohammed, Mashael S. Maashi, Begonya Garcia-Zapirain, N. J. Sairamya and S. Thomas George

Sensors 2020, 20(17), 4952; https://doi.org/10.3390/s20174952 - 1 Sep 2020

Cited by 50 | Viewed by 3754

Abstract

The discrimination of non-focal class (NFC) and focal class (FC), is vital in localizing the epileptogenic zone (EZ) during neurosurgery. In the conventional diagnosis method, the neurologist has to visually examine the long hour electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, which consumes time and is prone to error. Hence, in this present work, automated diagnosis of FC EEG signals from NFC EEG signals is developed using the Fast Walsh–Hadamard Transform (FWHT) method, entropies, and artificial neural network (ANN). The FWHT analyzes the EEG signals in the frequency domain and decomposes it into the Hadamard coefficients. Five different nonlinear features, namely approximate entropy (ApEn), log-energy entropy (LogEn), fuzzy entropy (FuzzyEn), sample entropy (SampEn), and permutation entropy (PermEn) are extracted from the decomposed Hadamard coefficients. The extracted features detail the nonlinearity in the NFC and the FC EEG signals. The judicious entropy features are supplied to the ANN classifier, with a 10-fold cross-validation method to classify the NFC and FC classes. Two publicly available datasets such as the University of Bonn and Bern-Barcelona dataset are used to evaluate the proposed approach. A maximum sensitivity of 99.70%, the accuracy of 99.50%, and specificity of 99.30% with the 3750 pairs of NFC and FC signal are achieved using the Bern-Barcelona dataset, while the accuracy of 92.80%, the sensitivity of 91%, and specificity of 94.60% is achieved using University of Bonn dataset. Compared to the existing technique, the proposed approach attained a maximum classification performance in both the dataset. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Brain Signals Acquisition and Processing)

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Review

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20 pages, 664 KiB

Open AccessReview

Heart Rate Variability in Psychology: A Review of HRV Indices and an Analysis Tutorial

by Tam Pham, Zen Juen Lau, S. H. Annabel Chen and Dominique Makowski

Sensors 2021, 21(12), 3998; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21123998 - 9 Jun 2021

Cited by 175 | Viewed by 43237

Abstract

The use of heart rate variability (HRV) in research has been greatly popularized over the past decades due to the ease and affordability of HRV collection, coupled with its clinical relevance and significant relationships with psychophysiological constructs and psychopathological disorders. Despite the wide use of electrocardiograms (ECG) in research and advancements in sensor technology, the analytical approach and steps applied to obtain HRV measures can be seen as complex. Thus, this poses a challenge to users who may not have the adequate background knowledge to obtain the HRV indices reliably. To maximize the impact of HRV-related research and its reproducibility, parallel advances in users’ understanding of the indices and the standardization of analysis pipelines in its utility will be crucial. This paper addresses this gap and aims to provide an overview of the most up-to-date and commonly used HRV indices, as well as common research areas in which these indices have proven to be very useful, particularly in psychology. In addition, we also provide a step-by-step guide on how to perform HRV analysis using an integrative neurophysiological toolkit, NeuroKit2. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Brain Signals Acquisition and Processing)

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16 pages, 602 KiB

Open AccessReview

Biomarker-Informed Machine Learning Model of Cognitive Fatigue from a Heart Rate Response Perspective

by Kar Fye Alvin Lee, Woon-Seng Gan and Georgios Christopoulos

Sensors 2021, 21(11), 3843; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21113843 - 2 Jun 2021

Cited by 14 | Viewed by 5470

Abstract

Cognitive fatigue is a psychological state characterised by feelings of tiredness and impaired cognitive functioning arising from high cognitive demands. This paper examines the recent research progress on the assessment of cognitive fatigue and provides informed recommendations for future research. Traditionally, cognitive fatigue is introspectively assessed through self-report or objectively inferred from a decline in behavioural performance. However, more recently, researchers have attempted to explore the biological underpinnings of cognitive fatigue to understand and measure this phenomenon. In particular, there is evidence indicating that the imbalance between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous activity appears to be a physiological correlate of cognitive fatigue. This imbalance has been indexed through various heart rate variability indices that have also been proposed as putative biomarkers of cognitive fatigue. Moreover, in contrast to traditional inferential methods, there is also a growing research interest in using data-driven approaches to assessing cognitive fatigue. The ubiquity of wearables with the capability to collect large amounts of physiological data appears to be a major facilitator in the growth of data-driven research in this area. Preliminary findings indicate that such large datasets can be used to accurately predict cognitive fatigue through various machine learning approaches. Overall, the potential of combining domain-specific knowledge gained from biomarker research with machine learning approaches should be further explored to build more robust predictive models of cognitive fatigue. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Brain Signals Acquisition and Processing)

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Other

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13 pages, 324 KiB

Open AccessLetter

A Machine Learning Approach for the Automatic Estimation of Fixation-Time Data Signals’ Quality

by Giulio Gabrieli, Jan Paolo Macapinlac Balagtas, Gianluca Esposito and Peipei Setoh

Sensors 2020, 20(23), 6775; https://doi.org/10.3390/s20236775 - 27 Nov 2020

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2630

Abstract

Fixation time measures have been widely adopted in studies with infants and young children because they can successfully tap on their meaningful nonverbal behaviors. While recording preverbal children’s behavior is relatively simple, analysis of collected signals requires extensive manual preprocessing. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of using different Machine Learning (ML)—a Linear SVC, a Non-Linear SVC, and K-Neighbors—classifiers to automatically discriminate between Usable and Unusable eye fixation recordings. Results of our models show an accuracy of up to the 80%, suggesting that ML tools can help human researchers during the preprocessing and labelling phase of collected data. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Brain Signals Acquisition and Processing)

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11 pages, 1592 KiB

Open AccessLetter

Sensors for Continuous Monitoring of Surgeon’s Cognitive Workload in the Cardiac Operating Room

by Lauren R. Kennedy-Metz, Roger D. Dias, Rithy Srey, Geoffrey C. Rance, Cesare Furlanello and Marco A. Zenati

Sensors 2020, 20(22), 6616; https://doi.org/10.3390/s20226616 - 19 Nov 2020

Cited by 12 | Viewed by 3410

Abstract

Monitoring healthcare providers’ cognitive workload during surgical procedures can provide insight into the dynamic changes of mental states that may affect patient clinical outcomes. The role of cognitive factors influencing both technical and non-technical skill are increasingly being recognized, especially as the opportunities to unobtrusively collect accurate and sensitive data are improving. Applying sensors to capture these data in a complex real-world setting such as the cardiac surgery operating room, however, is accompanied by myriad social, physical, and procedural constraints. The goal of this study was to investigate the feasibility of overcoming logistical barriers in order to effectively collect multi-modal psychophysiological inputs via heart rate (HR) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) acquisition in the real-world setting of the operating room. The surgeon was outfitted with HR and NIRS sensors during aortic valve surgery, and validation analysis was performed to detect the influence of intra-operative events on cardiovascular and prefrontal cortex changes. Signals collected were significantly correlated and noted intra-operative events and subjective self-reports coincided with observable correlations among cardiovascular and cerebral activity across surgical phases. The primary novelty and contribution of this work is in demonstrating the feasibility of collecting continuous sensor data from a surgical team member in a real-world setting. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Brain Signals Acquisition and Processing)

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9 pages, 552 KiB

Open AccessPerspective

Towards a Personalized Multi-Domain Digital Neurophenotyping Model for the Detection and Treatment of Mood Trajectories

by Yaron Sela, Lorena Santamaria, Yair Amichai-Hamburge and Victoria Leong

Sensors 2020, 20(20), 5781; https://doi.org/10.3390/s20205781 - 12 Oct 2020

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3382

Abstract

The commercial availability of many real-life smart sensors, wearables, and mobile apps provides a valuable source of information about a wide range of human behavioral, physiological, and social markers that can be used to infer the user’s mental state and mood. However, there are currently no commercial digital products that integrate these psychosocial metrics with the real-time measurement of neural activity. In particular, electroencephalography (EEG) is a well-validated and highly sensitive neuroimaging method that yields robust markers of mood and affective processing, and has been widely used in mental health research for decades. The integration of wearable neuro-sensors into existing multimodal sensor arrays could hold great promise for deep digital neurophenotyping in the detection and personalized treatment of mood disorders. In this paper, we propose a multi-domain digital neurophenotyping model based on the socioecological model of health. The proposed model presents a holistic approach to digital mental health, leveraging recent neuroscientific advances, and could deliver highly personalized diagnoses and treatments. The technological and ethical challenges of this model are discussed. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Brain Signals Acquisition and Processing)

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