Background

Simulating electromagnetic brain signals is becoming more and more prevalent because of the need to verify and validate electrophysiological analysis methods, especially with regards to measurements of functional connectivity and phase-amplitude coupling (PAC).

New Method

A Matlab software package with a graphical user interface, called SimMEEG, was developed so that novice and expert users could input basic signal parameters (e.g., multiple frequencies, amplitudes, durations, phase interactions, and phase-amplitude couplings) in order to simulate signals that approximate event-related brain activity. A major objective for developing this software was to create software to simulate interacting brain signals that could be used to verify functional connectivity analyses, specifically phase-locking value (PLV), phase-lag index (PLI) algorithms, and PAC. SimMEEG simulates three sources with various parameters defined by users. Users can define, multiple frequencies, event-related changes in amplitude, synchronizations (i.e., PLV and PLI), and PAC.

Results

SimMEEG simulated signals that estimated the signal input parameters within specific target limits for PLV, PLI, and PAC. In addition, SimMEEG’s synthetic signals closely approximated real human visual event-related responses. The Monte-Carlo module was used to simulate ten MEG and EEG datasets, conduct function connectivity analyses for comparison among several inverse solutions, and generate errors from ground truth. SimMEEG identified inverse solutions that had good and poor performances for functional connectivity analyses.

Comparison with existing methods

Comparison between other simulation methods and SimMEEG are discussed.

Conclusion

SimMEEG software could be used to simulate real human EEG and MEG to aid in verification of analysis pipelines by comparing analyzed results to the simulated ground truth of the user-defined event-related brain signals. A core program within SimMEEG, called SimSignals, might also be used in other fields that would benefit from simulations of three interacting signals.

中文翻译：

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SimMEEG软件用于通过基础功能连接来模拟与事件相关的MEG和EEG数据

背景

由于需要验证和验证电生理分析方法，尤其是在功能连接性和相幅耦合（PAC）的测量方面，模拟电磁脑信号变得越来越普遍。

新方法

开发了具有图形用户界面的Matlab软件包SimMEEG，以便新手和专家用户都可以输入基本信号参数（例如，多个频率，幅度，持续时间，相位相互作用和相位-幅度耦合），以模拟信号近似事件相关的大脑活动。开发此软件的主要目的是创建一个用于模拟交互大脑信号的软件，​​该软件可用于验证功能连接性分析，尤其是锁相值（PLV），相位滞后指数（PLI）算法和PAC。SimMEEG用用户定义的各种参数模拟三个源。用户可以定义多个频率，与事件相关的幅度变化，同步（即PLV和PLI）和PAC。

结果

SimMEEG仿真信号可在PLV，PLI和PAC的特定目标限制内估算信号输入参数。此外，SimMEEG的合成信号非常接近真实的人类视觉事件相关响应。蒙特卡洛模块用于模拟十个MEG和EEG数据集，进行功能连通性分析以在多个逆解之间进行比较，并根据地面真实情况生成误差。SimMEEG确定了功能连接分析性能优异的反向解决方案。

与现有方法的比较

讨论了其他仿真方法与SimMEEG的比较。

结论

SimMEEG软件可用于模拟真实的人类脑电图和MEG，通过将分析结果与用户定义的事件相关的大脑信号的模拟地面真实情况进行比较，从而帮助验证分析管道。SimMEEG中的一个名为SimSignals的核心程序也可以在其他领域中使用，这将受益于三个交互信号的仿真。