Background
Following Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease in elderly subjects, with the symptoms of akinesia, bradykinesia, rigidity, tremor, postural, balance instability, and other none-motor symptoms [
1,
2]. It could severely affect the patients’ daily life. Accurate diagnosis of PD is always difficult because of the complex etiology and the variety of clinical symptoms, especially in the early stage of the disease. As cognition impairment precedes motor symptoms and worsen as the disease progresses [
3,
4], there has been a lot of interest in finding trustworthy biomarkers for early diagnosis of PD. For this purpose, as electroencephalogram (EEG) provides a simple, portable, non-invasive, and low-cost alternative for neurological disease diagnosis, there is a growing research interest towards EEG biomarkers for monitoring the progression of PD [
5‐
7]. Pathological basal ganglia oscillations in PD are related to abnormal activity of the cortex [
8], which can cause lower inter-trial adherence, higher early phase deflection, and lower connectivity between right and left M1 and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex [
9]. Besides, compared to healthy controls (HCs), phase-amplitude coupling of PD patients was enhanced in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, premotor cortex, primary motor cortex and somatosensory cortex [
10]. Based on these findings, deep-learning models, such as convolutional neural network (CNN) [
11], convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) [
12], and deep residual shrinkage network (TQWT–DRSN) [
13] have also been successfully used to differentiate PD subjects from HCs with multi-channel resting-state EEG signals. These seminal studies indicate that EEG could potentially serve as a noninvasive diagnostic tool for PD.
Studies about EEG biomarkers monitoring the progression of PD have been popular for many years, as a non-invasive and practical tool for neurological disease diagnosis. It was found that non-linear quantifiers showed an increase in entropy and in the number of non-linear EEG segments for PDs [
14]. In addition, it was also proved that PDs’ EEG signals showed higher entropy with wavelet packet entropy method [
5]. Five entropy measures were used to detect PD from HC, indicating that log energy entropy, threshold entropy, sure entropy, and modified-Shannon entropy were promising biomarkers for PD detection [
15]. Yuvaraj et al. [
16] used higher order spectra as biomarkers for PDs. Cavanagh et al. [
17] proposed the obligatory neural mechanism systemic alteration which showed to be a reliable biomarker with improved performance. Jackson et al. [
18] found that sharpness ratio and steepness ratio of EEG waveform shape were higher, demonstrating basal ganglia thalamocortical loops were excessively synchronized in PDs. Coelho et al. [
19] proved Hjorth features could be extracted from EEG can detect PDs effectively. Anjum et al. [
20] proposed an EEG-based signal processing approach to distinguish PDs and control patients. Zhang et al. [
13] introduced hybrid tunable Q-factor wavelet transform and wavelet packet transform to analysis time–frequency characteristic in EEG signals of PDs, and the difference of complexity of EEG signals in patients with Parkinson and REM sleep disorders was identified. After source localization, functional-connectivity (FC) was estimated with dynamic phase-locking value method, indicating that PD patients with freezing of gait showed an impairment in executive control [
21]. Conti et al. performed spectral analysis of PD EEG data in five frequency bands, and calculated FC matrices based on both coherency and imaginary part of coherency. The results showed that a significant increase in γ band power density was found in PD patients, and that reduced FC in α–β frequency bands was observed in PD patients [
22]. In early onset PD patients, β band power of O1, O2, T5, T6, P3, P4, and C3 subregions significantly decreased, and interhemispheric β band coherences between the midtemporal and frontal regions was significantly increased [
23]. These pioneering studies indicate that we may find signs for PD progression directly from scarp EEG signals, without source localization which is time-consuming. However, existing analytical methods generally ignore the dynamic brain activity-correlations between each pair of EEG channels.
It was found that FC was affected early in the degenerative process [
4]. There is a wide interest in identifying FC states which can reflect impaired neural activity to improve diagnosis and clinical strategies of PD. Through time-varying FC states, we can reveal co-evolutionary brain activities associated with neural diseases [
24‐
26]. Therefore, temporal dynamics of the cortical regions have often been estimated to detect PD [
27‐
29], aiming to provide more insight into the correlation between scalp EEG alterations and cognitive deficits caused by PD. EEG amplitude synchronization between different brain subregions has been found to become stronger as PD severity increase [
30]. However, from the perspective of channelwise synchronization, transient FC states have not been explored in PD diagnosis till now. Moreover, without source localization, it is unnecessary to collect magnetic resonance images to construct head model to compute EEG inverse problems. This would save a lot of time and computing resources.
In this study, dFC was specially used to indicate that how EEG signals of different scalp channels co-fluctuate over time. We extracted channelwise dFC states directly from resting-state EEG signals to find the spatiotemporal characteristic biomarkers of neural dysfunction in PD. Channelwise dFC states were first estimated with weighted symbolic mutual information (wSMI) algorithm, and critical dFC states were then classified with
k-means clustering. Two open-source PD EEG data sets were used to validate our method (
https://doi.org/10.18112/openneuro.ds002778.v1.0.4: 32 channels, 16 health controls and 15 PD subjects.
https://doi.org/10.18112/openneuro.ds003490.v1.1.0: 64 channels, 25 health controls and 25 PD subjects). Here, our contribution lies in revealing that abnormal channelwise FC states within beta frequency band can be detected from resting-state EEG signals of patients with Parkinson's disease. This work offers a more intuitive view towards the changes of dFC states across HC, PD-on, PD-off groups, which may help early diagnoses of PD.
The
Background introduces the most relevant studies. In Section of
Methods, we introduce data sets used in this work and the details of the proposed method. In
Result section, we present results on two data sets. Section
Discussion investigates the influence of the proposed method and discusses limitations of the current study and future research directions. We conclude this letter in Section
Conlcusion.
Discussion
As damaging effects of basal ganglia dysfunction pass across the cortex [
8], understanding the changes in channelwise cortical synchronization in PD is important. Using wSMI and
k-means clustering techniques, the present study has comprehensively characterized channelwise dFC states directly extracted from scalp resting-state EEG recordings of PD patients, providing novel insights into abnormal brain synchronization related to PD. The findings indicate that the dFC states, to some extent, can differentiate PD subjects from healthy controls. Since the two open PD data sets are lack of detailed therapy information, it is difficult to assess effects of medication therapy on dFC states.
Brain network oscillations are crucial to achieve cognitive functions, which are often disrupted by PD. Although it was reported that non-motor symptoms may be related mainly to changes in the alpha frequency band [
43,
44], no significantly different FC states within alpha band were found from both data set 1 and data set 2. Otherwise, impaired channelwise dFC states (significant differences in the proportions of state5 and state6) in gamma band in PD were found for data set 1, in accordance with [
12,
45]. However, no states in gamma band were found for data set 2. This may be attributed to two factors. One is distribution of scalp EEG electrodes, and the other is that the number of EEG channels is different. Many researchers consistently found that PD has been associated with increased Beta (13–30 Hz) synchronization and Beta bursts in the basal ganglia [
10,
18,
46]. Compared to HCs, PD patients show a decrease in Beta frequency [
47,
48]. Neural activity in beta frequency band was found to be excessively synchronized in PD [
35]. In line with these studies, significant changes in proportions of FC states within Beta frequency band were consistently observed from both EEG data sets.
As for EEG data set 1 (32-channel), significant differences were only found in proportions of one dFC state (State1) in Beta band, and two dFC states (State5 and State6) in Gamma band. Regarding EEG data set 2 (64-channel), however, significant differences were found in proportions of more dFC states, including two dFC states (state3, state4, and state5) in Delta band, two dFC states (state2 and state5) in Theta band, and three states (state3, state4, and state6) in Beta band. This indicates that more densely distributed scalp electrodes can capture more distinguishing dFC features associated with PD from resting-state EEG signals. The reason might be that higher-density EEG electrodes can provide higher spatial-resolution physiological information over time about PDs.
While there has been debates on PD prediction from scalp EEG, there is a strong consensus that dFC patterns in EEG signals and their mutual transformation have a neuronal activity origin. And this may offer a new understanding of PD-related brain changes. Here, through analyzing changing patterns of the clustered dFC states from resting-state scalp EEG signals, our work may help find a convenient and low-cost biomarker for PD in early stage, and reflect co-fluctuating patterns between each pair of EEG channels over time during PD progression. Successful performance of cognitive tasks requires precise synchronization between brain subregions. High temporal resolution of EEG signals allows the study of transient functional connectivity between different brain subregions. In next step, we will recruit more PD patients with motor and non-motor symptoms to explore dFC specifically associated with distinct PD symptoms.
Although wSMI provides an efficient way to detect nonlinear coupling and makes few hypotheses on the type of interactions of EEG signals, it may have low sensitivity when considering larger frequency range. In addition, the number of test subjects is relatively small. In future, more PD subjects would be recruited to evaluate our methods.
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