Search

The brain functions as an accurate circuit that regulates information to be sequentially propagated and processed in a hierarchical manner. However, it is still unknown how the brain is hierarchically organized and how information is dynamically propagated during high-level cognition. In this study, we developed a new scheme for quantifying the information transmission velocity (ITV) by combining electroencephalogram (EEG) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), and then mapped the cortical ITV network (ITVN) to explore the information transmission mechanism of the human brain. The application in MRI-EEG data of P300 revealed bottom-up and top-down ITVN interactions subserving P300 generation, which was comprised of four hierarchical modules. Among these four modules, information exchange between visual- and attention-activated regions occurred at a high velocity, related cognitive processes could thus be efficiently accomplished due to the heavy myelination of these regions. Moreover, inter-individual variability in P300 was probed to be attributed to the difference in information transmission efficiency of the brain, which may provide new insight into the cognitive degenerations in clinical neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease, from the transmission velocity perspective. Together, these findings confirm the capacity of ITV to effectively determine the efficiency of information propagation in the brain. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Refereed/Peer-reviewed Although the spatiotemporal complexity and network connectivity are clarified to be disrupted during the general anesthesia (GA) induced unconsciousness, it remains to be difficult to exactly monitor the fluctuation of consciousness clinically. In this study, to track the loss of consciousness (LOC) induced by GA, we first developed the multi-channel cross fuzzy entropy method to construct the time-varying networks, whose temporal fluctuations were then explored and quantitatively evaluated. Thereafter, an algorithm was further proposed to detect the time onset at which patients lost their consciousness. The results clarified during the resting state, relatively stable fuzzy fluctuations in multi-channel network architectures and properties were found; by contrast, during the LOC period, the disrupted frontal-occipital connectivity occurred at the early stage, while at the later stage, the inner-frontal connectivity was identified. When specifically exploring the early LOC stage, the uphill of the clustering coefficients and the downhill of the characteristic path length were found, which might help resolve the propofol-induced consciousness fluctuation in patients. Moreover, the developed detection algorithm was validated to have great capacity in exactly capturing the time point (in seconds) at which patients lost consciousness. The findings demonstrated that the time-varying cross-fuzzy networks help decode the GA and are of great significance for developing anesthesia depth monitoring technology clinically.