Emotional decoding and automatic identification of major depressive disorder (MDD) are helpful for the timely diagnosis of the disease. Electroencephalography (EEG) is sensitive to changes in the functional state of the human brain, showing its potential to help doctors diagnose MDD. In this paper, an approach for identifying MDD by fusing interhemispheric asymmetry and cross-correlation with EEG signals is proposed and tested on 32 subjects [16 patients with MDD and 16 healthy controls (HCs)]. First, the structural features and connectivity features of the θ-, α-, and β-frequency bands are extracted on the preprocessed and segmented EEG signals. Second, the structural feature matrix of the θ-, α-, and β-frequency bands are added to and subtracted from the connectivity feature matrix to obtain mixed features. Finally, the structural features, connectivity features, and the mixed features are fed to three classifiers to select suitable features for the classification, and it is found that our mode achieves the best classification results using the mixed features. The results are also compared with those from some state-of-the-art methods, and we achieved an accuracy of 94.13%, a sensitivity of 95.74%, a specificity of 93.52%, and an F1-score (f1) of 95.62% on the data from Beijing Anding Hospital, Capital Medical University. The study could be generalized to develop a system that may be helpful in clinical purposes.

Schizophrenia is a devastating disease with a prevalence of 1% in populations around the world. Current diagnostic techniques of schizophrenia and high-risk population are based on subjective psychiatric interviews. Early diagnosis and intervention can mitigate progression and improve treatment outcomes. However, the lack of biomarkers that support objective examinations has been a long-term bottleneck in clinical diagnosis and assessment of schizophrenia and its high-risk state. In the present study, resting-state 128-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) data were acquired from 65 participants, including clinically-stable individuals with first-episode schizophrenia (FESZ), individuals at ultra-high-risk (UHR) and high-risk (HR), and healthy controls (HC). Microstate analysis was used to assess the dynamics of functional networks in these participants. Three features were extracted for each class of microstate (A, B, C, D, E, F): duration, occurrence and time coverage. Furthermore, clinical examinations and cognitive tests were performed. Behavioral results showed poorer performances in the participants as the disease progressed. Moreover, microstate features computed from resting-state EEG microstates (especially microstate class D) were capable of distinguishing the four groups of individuals. Combined biomarkers including clinical examinations, cognitive tests and EEG microstate parameters were identified as a potential effective diagnostic tool, achieving the highest classification performance using the random forest model compared with the support vector machine (SVM) and long short term memory (LSTM) networks, with an average classification of 92%, mean sensitivity of 91.8%, and specificity of 90.8% among the four groups, which were much higher than that only using behavioral features. The results demonstrate that microstate-based indicators together with behavioral results may act as biomarkers for early diagnosis and prediction of at-risk individuals of schizophrenia. Furthermore, our findings illustrate the potential use of resting-state EEG in clinical screening, classification and quantitative evaluation of patients with neurodevelopmental disorders.

Anxiety disorder is a mental illness that involves extreme fear or worry, which can alter the balance of chemicals in the brain. This change and evaluation of anxiety state are accompanied by a comprehensive treatment procedure. It is well-known that the treatment of anxiety is chiefly based on psychotherapy and drug therapy, and there is no objective standard evaluation. In this paper, the proposed method focuses on examining neural changes to explore the effect of mindfulness regulation in accordance with neurofeedback in patients with anxiety. We designed a closed neurofeedback experiment that includes three stages to adjust the psychological state of the subjects. A total of 34 subjects, 17 with anxiety disorder and 17 healthy, participated in this experiment. Through the three stages of the experiment, electroencephalography (EEG) resting state signal and mindfulness-based EEG signal were recorded. Power spectral density was selected as the evaluation index through the regulation of neurofeedback mindfulness, and repeated analysis of variance (ANOVA) method was used for statistical analysis. The findings of this study reveal that the proposed method has a positive effect on both types of subjects. After mindfulness adjustment, the power map exhibited an upward trend. The increase in the average power of gamma wave indicates the relief of anxiety. The enhancement of the wave power represents an improvement in the subjects’ mindfulness ability. At the same time, the results of ANOVA showed thatP< 0.05, i.e., the difference was significant. From the aspect of neurophysiological signals, we objectively evaluated the ability of our experiment to relieve anxiety. The neurofeedback mindfulness regulation can effect on the brain activity pattern of anxiety disorder patients.

Motor imagery is one of the classical paradigms which have been used in brain-computer interface and motor function recovery. Finger movement-based motor execution is a complex biomechanical architecture and a crucial task for establishing most complicated and natural activities in daily life. Some patients may suffer from alternating hemiplegia after brain stroke and lose their ability of motor execution. Fortunately, the ability of motor imagery might be preserved independently and worked as a backdoor for motor function recovery. The efficacy of motor imagery for achieving significant recovery for the motor cortex after brain stroke is still an open question. In this study, we designed a new paradigm to investigate the neural mechanism of thirty finger movements in two scenarios: motor execution and motor imagery. Eleven healthy participants performed or imagined thirty hand gestures twice based on left and right finger movements. The electroencephalogram (EEG) signal for each subject during sixty trials left and right finger motor execution and imagery were recorded during our proposed experimental paradigm. The Granger causality (G-causality) analysis method was employed to analyze the brain connectivity and its strength between contralateral premotor, motor, and sensorimotor areas. Highest numbers for G-causality trials of 37 ± 7.3, 35.5 ± 8.8, 36.3 ± 10.3, and 39.2 ± 9.0 and lowest Granger causality coefficients of 9.1 ± 3.2, 10.9 ± 3.7, 13.2 ± 0.6, and 13.4 ± 0.6 were achieved from the premotor to motor area during execution/imagination tasks of right and left finger movements, respectively. These results provided a new insight into motor execution and motor imagery based on hand gestures, which might be useful to build a new biomarker of finger motor recovery for partially or even completely plegic patients. Furthermore, a significant difference of the G-causality trial number was observed during left finger execution/imagery and right finger imagery, but it was not observed during the right finger execution phase. Significant difference of the G-causality coefficient was observed during left finger execution and imagery, but it was not observed during right finger execution and imagery phases. These results suggested that different MI-based brain motor function recovery strategies should be taken for right-hand and left-hand patients after brain stroke.

Combination of electroencephalogram (EEG) recording and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) plays a potential role in neuroimaging due to its high spatial and temporal resolution. However, EEG is easily influenced by ballistocardiogram (BCG) artifacts and may cause false identification of the related EEG features, such as epileptic spikes. There are many related methods to remove them, however, they do not consider the time-varying features of BCG artifacts. In this paper, a novel method using clustering algorithm to catch the BCG artifacts' features and together with the constrained ICA (ccICA) is proposed to remove the BCG artifacts. We first applied this method to the simulated data, which was constructed by adding the BCG artifacts to the EEG signal obtained from the conventional environment. Then, our method was tested to demonstrate the effectiveness during EEG and fMRI experiments on 10 healthy subjects. In simulated data analysis, the value of error in signal amplitude (Er) computed by ccICA method was lower than those from other methods including AAS, OBS, and cICA (p < 0.005). In vivo data analysis, the Improvement of Normalized Power Spectrum (INPS) calculated by ccICA method in all electrodes was much higher than AAS, OBS, and cICA methods (p < 0.005). We also used other evaluation index (e.g., power analysis) to compare our method with other traditional methods. In conclusion, our novel method successfully and effectively removed BCG artifacts in both simulated and vivo EEG data tests, showing the potentials of removing artifacts in EEG-fMRI applications.