This short survey the reviews recent literature on brain connectivity studies. It encompasses all forms of static and dynamic connectivity whether anatomical, functional, or effective. The last decade has seen an ever increasing number of studies devoted to deduce functional or effective connectivity, mostly from functional neuroimaging experiments. Resting state conditions have become a dominant experimental paradigm, and a number of resting state networks, among them the prominent default mode network, have been identified. Graphical models represent a convenient vehicle to formalize experimental findings and to closely and quantitatively characterize the various networks identified. Underlying these abstract concepts are anatomical networks, the so-called connectome, which can be investigated by functional imaging techniques as well. Future studies have to bridge the gap between anatomical neuronal connections and related functional or effective connectivities.
Due to external stimuli, biomedical signals are in general non-linear and non-stationary. Empirical Mode Decomposition in conjunction with a Hilbert spectral transform, together called Hilbert-Huang Transform, is ideally suited to extract essential components which are characteristic of the underlying biological or physiological processes. The method is fully adaptive and generates the basis to represent the data solely from these data and based on them. The basis functions, called Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) represent a complete set of locally orthogonal basis functions whose amplitude and frequency may vary over time. The contribution reviews the technique of EMD and related algorithms and discusses illustrative applications.
1 August 2006 in Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine