Investigation of Brain Functional Networks in Children Suffering from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

ADHD defects the recognition of facial emotions. This study assesses the neurophysiological differences between children with ADHD and matched healthy controls during a face emotional recognition task. The study also explores how brain connectivity is affected by ADHD. Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals were recorded from 64 scalp electrodes. Event-related phase coherence (ERPCOH) method was applied to pre-processed signals, and functional connectivity between any pair of electrodes was computed in different frequency bands. A logistic regression (LR) classifier with elastic net regularization (ENR) was trained to classify ADHD and HC participants using the functional connectivity of frequency bands as a potential biomarker. Subsequently, the brain network is constructed using graph-theoretic techniques, and graph indices such as clustering coefficient (C) and shortest path length (L) were calculated. Significant intra-hemispheric and the inter-hemispheric discrepancy between ADHD and healthy control (HC) groups in the beta band was observed. The graph features indicate that the clustering coefficient is significantly higher in the ADHD group than that in the HC group. At the same time, the shortest path length is significantly lower in the beta band. ADHD's brain networks have a problem in transferring information among various neural regions, which can cause a deficiency in the processing of facial emotions. The beta band seems better to reflect the differences between ADHD and HC. The observed functional connectivity and graph differences could also be helpful in ADHD investigations.