Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that affects approximately fifty million people according to the World Health Organization. While electroencephalography (EEG) plays important roles in monitoring the brain activity of patients with epilepsy and diagnosing epilepsy, an expert is needed to analyze all EEG recordings to detect epileptic activity. This method is obviously time-consuming and tedious, and a timely and accurate diagnosis of epilepsy is essential to initiate antiepileptic drug therapy and subsequently reduce the risk of future seizures and seizure-related complications. In this study, a convolutional neural network (CNN) based on raw EEG signals instead of manual feature extraction was used to distinguish ictal, preictal, and interictal segments for epileptic seizure detection. We compared the performances of time and frequency domain signals in the detection of epileptic signals based on the intracranial Freiburg and scalp CHB-MIT databases to explore the potential of these parameters. Three types of experiments involving two binary classification problems (interictal vs. preictal and interictal vs. ictal) and one three-class problem (interictal vs. preictal vs. ictal) were conducted to explore the feasibility of this method. Using frequency domain signals in the Freiburg database, average accuracies of 96.7, 95.4, and 92.3% were obtained for the three experiments, while the average accuracies for detection in the CHB-MIT database were 95.6, 97.5, and 93% in the three experiments. Using time domain signals in the Freiburg database, the average accuracies were 91.1, 83.8, and 85.1% in the three experiments, while the signal detection accuracies in the CHB-MIT database were only 59.5, 62.3, and 47.9% in the three experiments. Based on these results, the three cases are effectively detected using frequency domain signals. However, the effective identification of the three cases using time domain signals as input samples is achieved for only some patients. Overall, the classification accuracies of frequency domain signals are significantly increased compared to time domain signals. In addition, frequency domain signals have greater potential than time domain signals for CNN applications.

A sample entropy (SampEn)-based emotion recognition approach was presented. The SampEn results of notable EEG channels screened by K-S test were fed to the support vector machine (SVM)-weight classifier for training, after which it was applied to two emotion recognition tasks. One is to distinguish positive and negative emotion with high arousal and the other genitive emotion with different arousal status. Results showed that channels related to emotions were mostly located on the prefrontal region, i.e., F3, CP5, FP2, FZ, and FC2. And they were applied to form the input vectors of SVM-weight classifier. The accuracies of the present algorithm for the two tasks were 80.43% and 79.11%, respectively indicated by the leave-one-person-out validation procedure, demonstrating that the present algorithm had a reasonable generalization capability.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a degenerative brain disease with a high and irreversible incidence. In recent years, because brain signals have complex nonlinear dynamics, there has been growing interest in studying complex changes in the time series of brain signals in patients with AD. We reviewed studies of complexity analyses of single-channel time series from electroencephalogram (EEG), magnetoencephalogram (MEG), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in AD and determined future research directions. A systematic literature search for 2000–2019 was performed in the Web of Science and PubMed databases, resulting in 126 identified studies. Compared to healthy individuals, the signals from AD patients have less complexity and more predictable oscillations, which are found mainly in the left parietal, occipital, right frontal, and temporal regions. This complexity is considered a potential biomarker for accurately responding to the functional lesion in AD. The current review helps to reveal the patterns of dysfunction in the brains of patients with AD and to investigate whether signal complexity can be used as a biomarker to accurately respond to the functional lesion in AD. We proposed further studies in the signal complexities of AD patients, including investigating the reliability of complexity algorithms and the spatial patterns of signal complexity. In conclusion, the current review helps to better understand the complexity of abnormalities in the AD brain and provide useful information for AD diagnosis.

Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness that causes great harm to patients, so timely and accurate detection is essential. This study aimed to identify a better feature to represent electroencephalography (EEG) signals and improve the classification accuracy of patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls by using EEG signals. Our research method involves two steps. First, the EEG time series is preprocessed, and the extracted time-domain and frequency-domain features are transformed into a sequence of red–green–blue (RGB) images that carry spatial information. Second, we construct hybrid deep neural networks (DNNs) that combine convolution neural networks and long short-term memory to address RGB images to classify schizophrenic patients and healthy controls. The results show that the fuzzy entropy (FuzzyEn) feature is more significant than the fast Fourier transform (FFT) feature in brain topography. The deep learning (DL) method that we propose achieves an average accuracy of 99.22% with FuzzyEn and an average accuracy of 96.34% with FFT. These results show that the best effect is to extract fuzzy features as input features from EEG time series and then use a hybrid DNN for classification. Compared with the most advanced methods in this field, significant improvements have been achieved.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a frequently observed, irreversible brain function disorder among elderly individuals. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) has been introduced as an alternative approach to assessing brain functional abnormalities in AD patients. However, alterations in the brain rs-fMRI signal complexities in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and AD patients remain unclear. Here, we described the novel application of permutation entropy (PE) to investigate the abnormal complexity of rs-fMRI signals in MCI and AD patients. The rs-fMRI signals of 30 normal controls (NCs), 33 early MCI (EMCI), 32 late MCI (LMCI) and 29 AD patients were obtained from the Alzheimer's disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database. After preprocessing, whole-brain entropy maps of the four groups were extracted and subjected to Gaussian smoothing. We performed a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the brain entropy maps of the four groups. The results after adjusting for age and sex differences together revealed that the patients with AD exhibited lower complexity than did the MCI and NC controls. We found five clusters that exhibited significant differences and were distributed primarily in the occipital, frontal and temporal lobes. The average PE of the five clusters exhibited a decreasing trend from MCI to AD. The AD group exhibited the least complexity. Additionally, the average PE of the five clusters was significantly positively correlated with the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores and significantly negatively correlated with Functional Assessment Questionnaire (FAQ) scores and global Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) scores in the patient groups. Significant correlations were also found between the PE and regional homogeneity (ReHo) in the patient groups. These results indicated that declines in PE might be related to changes in regional functional homogeneity in AD. These findings suggested that complexity analyses using PE in rs-fMRI signals can provide important information about the fMRI characteristics of cognitive impairments in MCI and AD.