Complexity analysis of source activity underlying the neuromagnetic somatosensory steady-state response

Using the notion of complexity and synchrony, this study presents a data-driven pipeline of nonlinear analysis of neuromagnetic sources reconstructed from human magnetoencephalographic (MEG) data collected in reaction to vibrostimulation of the right index finger. The dynamics of MEG source activity was reconstructed with synthetic aperture magnetometry (SAM) beam-forming technique. Considering brain as a complex system, we applied complexity-based tools to identify brain areas with dynamic patterns that remain regular across repeated stimulus presentations, and to characterize their synchronized behavior. Volumetric maps of brain activation were calculated using sample entropy as a measure of signal complexity. The complexity analysis identified activity in the primary somatosensory (SI) area contralateral to stimuli and bilaterally in the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) as regions with decreased complexity, consistently expressed in a group of subjects. Seeding an activated source with low complexity in the SI area, cross-sample entropy was used to generate synchrony maps. Cross-sample entropy analysis confirmed the synchronized dynamics of neuromagnetic activity between areas SI and PPC, robustly expressed across subjects. Our results extend the understanding of synchronization between co-activated brain regions, focusing on temporal coordination between events in terms of synchronized multidimensional signal patterns.