An EEG-based real-time cortical rhythmic activity monitoring system

In the present study, we introduce an electroencephalography (EEG)-based, real-time, cortical rhythmic activity monitoring system which can monitor spatiotemporal changes of cortical rhythmic activity on a subject's cortical surface, not on the subject's scalp surface, with a high temporal resolution. In the monitoring system, a frequency domain inverse operator is preliminarily constructed, considering the subject's anatomical information and sensor configurations, and then the spectral current power at each cortical vertex is calculated for the Fourier transforms of successive sections of continuous data, when a particular frequency band is given. A preliminary offline simulation study using four sets of artifact-free, eye-closed, resting EEG data acquired from two dementia patients and two normal subjects demonstrates that spatiotemporal changes of cortical rhythmic activity can be monitored at the cortical level with a maximal delay time of about 200 ms, when 18 channel EEG data are analyzed under a Pentium4 3.4 GHz environment. The first pilot system is applied to two human experiments-(1) cortical alpha rhythm changes induced by opening and closing eyes and (2) cortical mu rhythm changes originated from the arm movements-and demonstrated the feasibility of the developed system.