Cortical Network Dynamics during Foot Movements
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Cortical Network Dynamics during Foot Movements Fabrizio De Vico Fallani & Laura Astolfi & Febo Cincotti & Donatella Mattia & Maria Grazia Marciani & Andrea Tocci & Serenella Salinari & Herbert Witte & Wolfram Hesse & Shangkai Gao & Alfredo Colosimo & Fabio Babiloni
Received: 16 April 2007 / Accepted: 23 November 2007 / Published online: 12 February 2008 # Humana Press Inc. 2007
Abstract The present work intends to evaluate the dynamics of the cerebral networks during the preparation and the execution of the foot movement. In order to achieve this objective, we have used mathematical tools capable of estimating the cortical activity via high-resolution EEG techniques. Afterwards we estimated, the instantaneous F. De Vico Fallani (*) : A. Colosimo Interdep. Research Centre for Models and Information Analysis in Biomedical Systems, University of Rome “Sapienza”, Corso V. Emanuele, 244, 00186 Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] F. De Vico Fallani : L. Astolfi : F. Cincotti : D. Mattia : M. G. Marciani : A. Tocci : F. Babiloni IRCCS “Fondazione Santa Lucia”, Rome, Italy A. Colosimo : F. Babiloni Department of Human Physiology and Pharmacology, University “Sapienza”, Rome, Italy S. Salinari Department of Computer and Systems Science, University “Sapienza”, Rome, Italy M. G. Marciani Department of Neuroscience, University “Tor Vergata”, Rome, Italy H. Witte : W. Hesse Institute of Medical Statistics Computer Sciences and Documentation, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Jena, Germany S. Gao Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijng, China
relationships occurring among the time-series of sixteen regions of interest (ROIs) in the Alpha (7–12 Hz) and Beta (13–29 Hz) band through the adaptive multivariate autoregressive models. Eventually, we evaluated the weightedtopology of the cerebral networks by calculating some theoretical graph indexes. The results show that the main structural changes are encoded in the highest spectral contents (Beta band). In particular, during the execution of the foot movement the cingulate motor areas (CM) work as network “hubs” presenting a large amount of outgoing links to the other ROIs. Moreover, the connectivity pattern changes its structure according to the different temporal stages of the task. In particular, the communication between the ROIs reaches its highest level of efficiency during the preparation of the foot movement, as revealed by the “small-world” property of the network, which is characterized by the presence of abundant clustering connections combined with short average distances between the cortical areas. Keywords High-resolution EEG . Adaptive MVAR . Granger causality . Graph theory
Introduction The necessity of an objective comprehension of the relationships among the different brain structures is assuming an essential role in Neuroscience (Horwitz 2003). Indeed, several methods with the aim of estimating the functional links among such structures have been proposed and discussed in literature (David et a
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