Revealing the spatiotemporal brain dynamics of covert speech compared with overt speech: A simultaneous EEG-fMRI study.

Covert speech (CS) refers to speaking internally to oneself without producing any sound or movement. CS is involved in multiple cognitive functions and disorders. Reconstructing CS content by brain-computer interface (BCI) is also an emerging technique. However, it is still controversial whether CS is a truncated neural process of overt speech (OS) or involves independent patterns. Here, we performed a word-speaking experiment with simultaneous EEG-fMRI. It involved 32 participants, who generated words both overtly and covertly. By integrating spatial constraints from fMRI into EEG source localization, we precisely estimated the spatiotemporal dynamics of neural activity. During CS, EEG source activity was localized in three regions: the left precentral gyrus, the left supplementary motor area, and the left putamen. Although OS involved more brain regions with stronger activations, CS was characterized by an earlier event-locked activation in the left putamen (peak at 262 ms versus 1170 ms). The left putamen was also identified as the only hub node within the functional connectivity (FC) networks of both OS and CS, while showing weaker FC strength towards speech-related regions in the dominant hemisphere during CS. Path analysis revealed significant multivariate associations, indicating an indirect association between the earlier activation in the left putamen and CS, which was mediated by reduced FC towards speech-related regions. These findings revealed the specific spatiotemporal dynamics of CS, offering insights into CS mechanisms that are potentially relevant for future treatment of self-regulation deficits, speech disorders, and development of BCI speech applications.

Fault Detection and Diagnosis in Industrial Processes with Variational Autoencoder: A Comprehensive Study.

This work considers industrial process monitoring using a variational autoencoder (VAE). As a powerful deep generative model, the variational autoencoder and its variants have become popular for process monitoring. However, its monitoring ability, especially its fault diagnosis ability, has not been well investigated. In this paper, the process modeling and monitoring capabilities of several VAE variants are comprehensively studied. First, fault detection schemes are defined in three distinct ways, considering latent, residual, and the combined domains. Afterwards, to conduct the fault diagnosis, we first define the deep contribution plot, and then a deep reconstruction-based contribution diagram is proposed for deep domains under the fault propagation mechanism. In a case study, the performance of the process monitoring capability of four deep VAE models, namely, the static VAE model, the dynamic VAE model, and the recurrent VAE models (LSTM-VAE and GRU-VAE), has been comparatively evaluated on the industrial benchmark Tennessee Eastman process. Results show that recurrent VAEs with a deep reconstruction-based diagnosis mechanism are recommended for industrial process monitoring tasks.