Between-Frequency Topographical and Dynamic High-Order Functional Connectivity for Driving Drowsiness Assessment

• Published in: IEEE transactions on neural systems and rehabilitation engineering Vol. 27; no. 3; pp. 358 - 367
• Main Authors: Harvy, Jonathan, Thakor, Nitish, Bezerianos, Anastasios, Li, Junhua
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.03.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Adult; Alpha Rhythm - physiology; Automobile Driving - psychology; Automobiles; Beta Rhythm - physiology; between-frequency connectivity; Cerebral Cortex - physiology; Coherence; Correlation; driving drowsiness; Drowsiness; dynamic connectivity; EEG; Electroencephalography; Electroencephalography - methods; Fatigue; Female; Frequencies; Healthy Volunteers; High-order functional connectivity; Humans; Male; Modularity; Neural Pathways - physiology; Reliability; Reliability analysis; Reproducibility of Results; Sleepiness; supra-adjacency matrix; Theta Rhythm - physiology; Young Adult
• ISSN: 1534-4320; 1558-0210; 1558-0210
• DOI: 10.1109/TNSRE.2019.2893949

Previous studies exploring driving drowsiness utilized spectral power and functional connectivity without considering between-frequency and more complex synchronizations. To complement such lacks, we explored inter-regional synchronizations based on the topographical and dynamic properties between frequency bands using high-order functional connectivity (HOFC) and envelope correlation. We proposed the dynamic interactions of HOFC, associated-HOFC, and a global metric measuring the aggregated effect of the functional connectivity. The EEG dataset was collected from 30 healthy subjects, undergoing two driving sessions. The two-session setting was employed for evaluating the metric reliability across sessions. Based on the results, we observed reliably significant metric changes, mainly involving the alpha band. In HOFC θα , HOFC αβ , associated-HOFC θα , and associatedHOFC αβ , the connection-level metrics in frontal-central, central-central,and central-parietal/occipitalareas were significantly increased, indicating a dominance in the central region. Similar results were also obtained in the HOFC θαβ and aHOFC θαβ . For dynamic-low-order-FC and dynamicHOFC, the global metrics revealed a reliably significant increment in the alpha, theta-alpha, and alpha-beta bands. Modularity indexes of associated-HOFC α and associatedHOFC θα also exhibited reliably significant differences. This paper demonstrated that within-band and betweenfrequency topographical and dynamic FC can provide complementary information to the traditional individual-band LOFC for assessing driving drowsiness.