Although driving fatigue has long been recognized as one of the leading causes of fatal accidents worldwide, the underlying neural mechanisms remain largely unknown that impedes the developments of automatic detection techniques. This study investigated the effects of driving fatigue on the reorganization of dynamic functional connectivity (FC) through our newly developed temporal brain network analysis framework. EEG data were recorded from 20 healthy subjects (male/female = 15/5, age = 22.2 ± 3.2 years) using a remote wireless cap with 24 channels. Temporal brain networks in the theta, alpha and beta were estimated using a sliding window approach and quantitatively compared between the most vigilant and fatigue states during a 90-min simulated driving experiment. Behaviorally, subjects demonstrated a salient driving fatigue effect as reflected by a monotonic increase of reaction time and speed variation. Furthermore, we found a significantly disintegrated spatiotemporal topology of dynamic FC as shown in reduced temporal global efficiency and increased temporal local efficiency at fatigue state. Specifically, we found localized changes of temporal closeness centrality mainly resided in the frontal and parietal areas. Finally, the changes of temporal network measures were associated with those of behavioral metrics. Our findings provide new insights into dynamic characteristics of functional connectivity during driving fatigue and demonstrate the potential for using temporal network metrics as reliable biomarkers for driving fatigue detection.

中文翻译：

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功能连接的动态重组揭示了模拟驾驶中与疲劳相关的性能下降


尽管驾驶疲劳长期以来一直被认为是全球致命事故的主要原因之一，但其潜在的神经机制仍然很大程度上未知，这阻碍了自动检测技术的发展。本研究通过我们新开发的时脑网络分析框架，研究了驾驶疲劳对动态功能连接（FC）重组的影响。使用具有 24 个通道的远程无线帽记录 20 名健康受试者（男/女 = 15/5，年龄 = 22.2 ± 3.2 岁）的 EEG 数据。使用滑动窗口方法估计了 θ、α 和 β 的颞叶网络，并在 90 分钟的模拟驾驶实验中对最警惕和疲劳状态之间进行了定量比较。在行为上，受试者表现出显着的驾驶疲劳效应，反映在反应时间和速度变化的单调增加上。此外，我们发现动态 FC 的时空拓扑显着瓦解，如疲劳状态下时间全局效率降低和时间局部效率增加所示。具体来说，我们发现时间紧密中心性的局部变化主要集中在额叶和顶叶区域。最后，时间网络测量的变化与行为指标的变化相关。我们的研究结果为驾驶疲劳期间功能连接的动态特征提供了新的见解，并证明了使用时间网络指标作为驾驶疲劳检测的可靠生物标志物的潜力。