Search results for " Connectivity"

Rainfall simulation and Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry for the analysis of soil water erosion in Mediterranean vineyards

2016

[EN] Soil water erosion is a serious problem, especially in agricultural lands.Among these, vineyards deserve attention, because they constitute for the Mediterranean areas a type of land use affected by high soil losses. A significant problem related to the study of soil water erosion in these areas consists in the lack of a standardized procedure of collecting data and reporting results, mainly due to a variability among the measurement methods applied. Given this issue and the seriousness of soil water erosion in Mediterranean vineyards, this works aims to quantify the soil losses caused by simulated rainstorms, and compare them with each other depending on two different methodologies: (…

A Critical Period for Prefrontal Network Configurations Underlying Psychiatric Disorders and Addiction

2020

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) has been classically defined as the brain region responsible for higher cognitive functions, including the decision-making process. Ample information has been gathered during the last 40 years in an attempt to understand how it works. We now know extensively about the connectivity of this region and its relationship with neuromodulatory ascending projection areas, such as the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) or the ventral tegmental area (VTA). Both areas are well-known regulators of the reward-based decision-making process and hence likely to be involved in processes like evidence integration, impulsivity or addiction biology, but also in helping us to predict…

Translational Model of Cortical Premotor-Motor Networks.

2021

Abstract Deciphering the physiological patterns of motor network connectivity is a prerequisite to elucidate aberrant oscillatory transformations and elaborate robust translational models of movement disorders. In the proposed translational approach, we studied the connectivity between premotor (PMC) and primary motor cortex (M1) by recording high-density electroencephalography in humans and between caudal (CFA) and rostral forelimb (RFA) areas by recording multi-site extracellular activity in mice to obtain spectral power, functional and effective connectivity. We identified a significantly higher spectral power in β- and γ-bands in M1compared to PMC and similarly in mice CFA layers (L) 2/…

Multivariate autoregressive model with instantaneous effects to improve brain connectivity estimation

2009

Single-trial Connectivity Estimation through the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator.

2019

Methods based on the use of multivariate autoregressive models (MVAR) have proved to be an accurate tool for the estimation of functional links between the activity originated in different brain regions. A well-established method for the parameters estimation is the Ordinary Least Square (OLS) approach, followed by an assessment procedure that can be performed by means of Asymptotic Statistic (AS). However, the performances of both procedures are strongly influenced by the number of data samples available, thus limiting the conditions in which brain connectivity can be estimated. The aim of this paper is to introduce and test a regression method based on Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selecti…

Measuring frequency domain granger causality for multiple blocks of interacting time series

2011

In the past years, several frequency-domain causality measures based on vector autoregressive time series modeling have been suggested to assess directional connectivity in neural systems. The most followed approaches are based on representing the considered set of multiple time series as a realization of two or three vector-valued processes, yielding the so-called Geweke linear feedback measures, or as a realization of multiple scalar-valued processes, yielding popular measures like the directed coherence (DC) and the partial DC (PDC). In the present study, these two approaches are unified and generalized by proposing novel frequency-domain causality measures which extend the existing meas…

Pre- and post-ictal brain activity characterization using combined source decomposition and connectivity estimation in epileptic children

2019

In this research, the study of functional connectivity between sources of electroencephalogram (EEG) activity assessed for different classes (well before seizure, preictal and post-ictal) was performed. EEG recordings were acquired from 12 subjects with focal epilepsy. Then, ten common spatial patterns (CSP) were obtained for EEG segments describing 95% of Riemannian distance between pairs of classes, followed by estimation of multivariate autoregressive (MVAR) models’ coefficients. The MVAR models were further used to extract coherence as a functional connectivity measures. Our results show that the coherence between CSP sources differs between baseline and pre-ictal segments: it has the l…

Multivariate Frequency Domain Analysis of Causal Interactions in Physiological Time Series

2011

A common way of obtaining information about a physiological system is to measure one or more signals from the system, consider their temporal evolution in the form of numerical time series, and obtain quantitative indexes through the application of time series analysis techniques. While historical approaches to time series analysis were addressed to the study of single signals, recent advances have made it possible to study collectively the behavior of several signals measured simultaneously from the considered system. In fact, multivariate (MV) time series analysis is nowadays extensively used to characterize interdependencies among multiple signals collected from dynamical physiological s…

Data Backup Dilemma

2016

When the Great East Japan Earthquake struck in 2011, several municipalities lost their residential data including backup. Since none of them had ever considered the total loss of data, data backup policy had been paid little attention. In many cases, the backup tapes were simply stored inside the server room, just beside the server rack. Following the calamity, the Japanese national government tried to introduce a data backup system to municipalities using the cloud. The purpose was to secure the safekeeping of backup data. However, municipalities were reluctant to go along with this since overcoming the loss of network connectivity during an earthquake remained foremost in their minds. The…

Functional Connectivity of Nucleus Accumbens and Medial Prefrontal Cortex With Other Brain Regions During Early-Abstinence Is Associated With Alcohol…

2021

Background: Alcohol dependence (AD) is a chronic recurrent brain disease that causes a heavy disease burden worldwide, partly due to high relapse rates after detoxification. Verified biomarkers are not available for AD and its relapse, although the nucleus accumbens (NAc) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) may play important roles in the mechanism of addiction. This study investigated AD- and relapse-associated functional connectivity (FC) of the NAc and mPFC with other brain regions during early abstinence.Methods: Sixty-eight hospitalized early-abstinence AD male patients and 68 age- and education-matched healthy controls (HCs) underwent resting-functional magnetic resonance imaging (r-f…