Violation of rhythmic expectancies can elicit late frontal gamma activity nested in theta oscillations.

Rhythm processing involves building expectations according to the hierarchical temporal structure of auditory events. Although rhythm processing has been addressed in the context of predictive coding, the properties of the oscillatory response in different cortical areas are still not clear. We explored the oscillatory properties of the neural response to rhythmic incongruence and the cross-frequency coupling between multiple frequencies to further investigate the mechanisms underlying rhythm perception. We designed an experiment to investigate the neural response to rhythmic deviations in which the tone either arrived earlier than expected or the tone in the same metrical position was omitted. These two manipulations modulate the rhythmic structure differently, with the former creating a larger violation of the general structure of the musical stimulus than the latter. Both deviations resulted in an MMN response, whereas only the rhythmic deviant resulted in a subsequent P3a. Rhythmic deviants due to the early occurrence of a tone, but not omission deviants, seemed to elicit a late high gamma response (60-80 Hz) at the end of the P3a over the left frontal region, which, interestingly, correlated with the P3a amplitude over the same region and was also nested in theta oscillations. The timing of the elicited high-frequency gamma oscillations related to rhythmic deviation suggests that it might be related to the update of the predictive neural model, corresponding to the temporal structure of the events in higher-level cortical areas.

Toward a fully integrated wireless wearable EEG-NIRS bimodal acquisition system.

OBJECTIVE: Interactions between neuronal electrical activity and regional changes in microcirculation are assumed to play a major role in physiological brain activity and the development of pathological disorders, but have been poorly elucidated to date. There is a need for advanced diagnostic tools to investigate the relationships between these two physiological processes. APPROACH: To meet these needs, a wireless wearable system has been developed, which combines a near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) system using light emitting diodes (LEDs) as a light source and silicon photodiodes as a detector with an integrated electroencephalography (EEG) system. MAIN RESULTS: The main advantages over currently available devices are miniaturization and integration of a real-time electrical and hemodynamic activity monitor into one wearable device. For patient distributed monitoring and creating a body-area network, up to seven same devices can be connected to a single base station (PC) synchronously. Each node presents enhanced portability due to the wireless communication and highly integrated components resulting in a small, lightweight signal acquisition device. Further progress includes the individual control of LEDs output to automatically or interactively adjust emitted light to the actual local situation online, the use of silicon photodiodes with a safe low-voltage power supply, and an integrated three dimensional accelerometer for movement detection for the identification of motion artifacts. SIGNIFICANCE: The device was tested and validated using our enhanced EEG-NIRS tissue mimicking fluid phantom for sensitivity mapping. Typical somatotopic electrical evoked potential experiments were performed to verify clinical applicability.

Development of an autonomic portable single-board computer based high resolution NIRS device for microcirculation analysis.

Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) is a wellestablished non-invasive technique for measuring metabolic changes in biological tissue. In this paper we describe the design and development of an autonomic portable single board computer based high resolution NIRS device, which allows quantification of these changes. The sensor-patch consisting of 8LEDs and 2photo-detectorsprovides8 channels for each detector, offering increased depth resolution for monitoring microcirculatory activity..NIRS data is acquired with a sampling rate of about 2Hz per channel using the data acquisition board which consists of a 16 bit ADC, a LED driver and programmable gain amplifiers. The components on the data acquisition board are controlled via the Advantech's PCM-3355L SBC based on Windows XP platform. The software was created using Visual Basic 6.0 and Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0. It offers optionally a real time 'monitoring' and a static data (offline) visualization mode. The most unique feature of the system is its ability to auto-calibrate itself i.e. Adopt the intensity of the LEDs output light to different experimental conditions, e.g. local melanin content, density of the tissue, and emitter-detector distances. To validate the device various experiments have been carried out such as measurements on resting and working gastrocnemius and biceps muscle in ambulatory situations. The achieved results confirmed adequate performance and reliability of the device.