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Variation of functional brain connectivity in epileptic seizures: an EEG analysis with cross-frequency phase synchronization

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Abstract

Frequency coupling in nervous system is believed to be associated with normal and impaired brain functions. However, most of the existing experiments have been concentrated on the coupling strength within frequency bands, while the coupling strength between different bands is ignored. In this work, we apply phase synchronization index (PSI) to investigate the cross-frequency coupling (CFC) of Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. The PSI matrixes for the multi-channel EEG signals are calculated from interictal to ictal period in each sliding time window. The results show that CFC changes obviously once seizure occurs between the different bands, and such alteration is earlier than the appearance of clinical symptoms in seizure. Considering the similar role of the within-frequency coupling (WFC), we further reconstruct multi-layered brain networks, including CFC networks and WFC networks. The graph metrics are applied to investigate the variation of network structure of the epileptic brain. Significant decreases/increases of the local/global efficiency are found in δ–β, δ–α, θ–α and δ–θ bands from the CFC network, while WFC network shows a significant decline in the local efficiency in θ and α bands. These findings suggest that CFC may provide a new perspective to observe the alteration of brain structure when seizure occurs, and the investigation of functional connectivity across the full frequency spectrum can give us a deeper understanding of epileptic brains.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by Tianjin Municipal Natural Science Foundation under Grants 13JCZDJC27900, Tangshan Science and Technology Planning Project (Grant No. 18130208A), and Key Research and Development Program Project of Hebei Province (Grant No. 18277773D). This work is also supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61701336), the Natural Science Foundation of Tianjin, China (Grant No. 17JCQNJC00800) and the funding of Hong Kong Scholars Programs (Grant No. XJ2016006). The authors also gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by Opening Fundation of Key Laboratory of Opto-technology and Intelligent Control (Lanzhou Jiaotong University), Ministry of Education (KFKT 2018-5).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China

    Haitao Yu, Lin Zhu, Lihui Cai, Jiang Wang & Chen Liu

  2. Department of Neurology, Tangshan Gongren Hospital, Tangshan, 063000, Hebei, China

    Nan Shi & Jing Liu

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  1. Haitao Yu
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  2. Lin Zhu
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  3. Lihui Cai
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Correspondence to Chen Liu.

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Yu, H., Zhu, L., Cai, L. et al. Variation of functional brain connectivity in epileptic seizures: an EEG analysis with cross-frequency phase synchronization. Cogn Neurodyn 14, 35–49 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-019-09551-y

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