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.
In recent years, there has been growing interest in studying the complexity of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) brain signals. As one of the most commonly used complexity methods, entropy measures have been used to quantitatively characterize abnormal brain activity in aged individuals and patients with psychopathic and neurological disorders, and most studies have analyzed brain signals from a single channel. The widely used entropy methods include approximate entropy (AE), sample entropy (SE), permutation entropy (PE), and fuzzy entropy (FE). However, the testretest reliability of different entropy methods remains to be explored. In this study, we investigated the distribution and test-retest reliability of four entropy measures and a new entropy algorithm we proposed, permutation fuzzy entropy (PFE), in three independent data sets at three levels, i.e., based on voxels, brain regions, and functional networks. Our results showed that analyzing fMRI signals with entropy showed strong tissue sensitivity. The highest reliability was achieved with PFE, and PE and FE were superior to AE and SE at all three levels. The percentage of nodes with good to excellent reliability in PFE, PE, FE, SE and AE was 94.31%, 52.65%, 18.56%, 11.36% and 0.76%, respectively. PFE and PE showed fair to good reliability in the visual network, auditory network, default-mode network, etc. In conclusion, characterizing brain entropy may provide an informative tool to assess the complexity of brain functions. Our results suggested that PFE and PE had better reliability and reflected more topological information related to normal and disordered functioning of the human brain.
Although many resting state and task state characteristics have been studied, it is still unclear how the brain network switches from the resting state during tasks. The current theory shows that the brain is a complex dynamic system and synchrony is defined to measure brain activity. The study compared the changes of synchrony between the resting state and different task states in healthy young participants (N = 954). It also examined the ability to switch from the resting state to the task-general architecture of synchrony. We found that the synchrony increased significantly during the tasks. And the results showed that the brain has a task-general architecture of synchrony during different tasks. The main feature of task-based reasoning is that the increase in synchrony of high-order cognitive networks is significant, while the increase in synchrony of sensorimotor networks is relatively low. In addition, the high synchrony of high-order cognitive networks in the resting state can promote task switching effectively and the pre-configured participants have better cognitive performance, which shows that spontaneous brain activity and cognitive ability are closely related. These results revealed changes in the brain network configuration for switching between the resting state and task state, highlighting the consistent changes in the brain network between different tasks. Also, there was an important relationship between the switching ability and the cognitive performance.
Parkinson's disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative disorder. Rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder (RBD) is one of the prodromal symptoms of PD. Studies have shown that brain information transmission is affected in PD patients. Consequently, we hypothesized that brain information transmission is impaired in RBD and PD. To prove our hypothesis, we performed functional connectivity (FC) and functional dynamics analysis of three aspects—based on the whole brain, within the resting-state network (RSN), and the interaction between RSNs—using normal control (NC) ( n = 21), RBD ( n = 24), and PD ( n = 45) resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) data sets. Furthermore, we tested the explanatory power of FC and functional dynamics for the clinical features. Our results found that the global functional dynamics and FC of RBD and PD were impaired. Within RSN, the impairment concentrated in the visual network (VIS) and sensorimotor network (SMN), and the impaired degree of SMN in RBD was higher than that in PD. On the interaction between RSNs, RBD showed a widespread decrease, and PD showed a focal decrease which concentrated in SMN and VIS. Finally, we proved FC and functional dynamics were related to clinical features. These differences confirmed that brain information transmission efficiency and flexibility are impaired in RBD and PD, and these impairments are associated with the clinical features of patients.
Although many characteristics of the resting state and task states have been studied, it is still unclear how the brain network switches from the resting state during tasks. The current theory is that the brain is a complex dynamic system and synchrony is defined to measure brain activity. This study compared the changes in synchrony between the resting state and different task states in healthy young participants and examined the ability to switch from the resting state to the task-general architecture of synchrony. We found that the synchrony increased significantly during the tasks and the brain has the task-general architecture of synchrony during different tasks, the increase of synchrony in high-order cognitive networks is particularly obvious, while the increase in the sensorimotor network is relatively low. In addition, the high synchrony of high-order cognitive networks in the resting state can promote effective task switching and the pre-configured participants have better cognitive performance, which shows that the spontaneous brain activity and cognitive ability are closely related. These results revealed changes in the configuration of the brain network for switching between the task states and the resting state, highlighted the consistent changes in the brain network between different tasks, and found that there is an important relationship between switching ability and cognitive performance.
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