Ultra-low Noise EEG at LSBB: Effective Connectivity Analysis

¹ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada
² International Collaboration On Repair Discoveries (ICORD), Blusson Spinal Cord Centre, 818 West 10th Avenue, Vancouver, BC, V5Z 1M9, Canada

^* Corresponding author: guyd@ece.ubc.ca

Abstract

In this study, we further investigate electroencephalographic (EEG) data recorded during October 2014 in the ultra-shielded capsule at LSBB, with a focus on the study of task-specific Granger-causal effective connectivity pat-terns. In previous studies, we showed that noise-free EEG signals acquired in LSBB are suitable for analysis of activity patterns in high frequency bands, i.e. 30 Hz and above. We previously demonstrated that increases in task/rest gamma band (30-70 Hz) energy ratios during ankle and wrist movements are more prominent in the LSBB capsule than in an above-ground hospital environ-ment. The present study extends previous analyses by examining gamma-band connectivity, i.e. the functional patterns of interaction between 64 channels of EEG within the gamma band during motor tasks. We use parameters from a MultiVariate Auto-Regressive (MVAR) model to estimate effective connectivity in 10-second batches of EEG and report the average patterns across all batches in which subjects repetitively move their ankle/wrist. We report the gamma-band connectivity results in a reduced form as strength of hemispheric and inter-regional connections. The analysis reveals that for some subjects, significant channel-wise connections in the LSBB capsule outnumber those in the hospital, suggesting that patterns of gamma-band connectivity are better reflected in low-noise environments. This study again demonstrates the poten-tial of the ultra-shielded capsule and motivates further protocol enhancements and analysis methods for conducting future high-frequency EEG studies within LSBB.