Network controllability analysis of awake and asleep conditions in the brain

The difference between sleep and wakefulness is critical for human health. Sleep takes up one third of our lives and remains one of the most mysterious conditions; it plays an important role in memory consolidation and health restoration. Distinct neural behaviors take place under awake and asleep conditions, according to neuroimaging studies. While disordered transitions between wakefulness and sleep accompany brain disease, further investigation of their specific characteristics is required. In this study, the difference is objectively quantified by means of network controllability. We propose a new pipeline using a public intracranial stereo-electroencephalography (stereo-EEG) dataset to unravel differences in the two conditions in terms of system neuroscience. Because intracranial stereo-EEG records neural oscillations covering large-scale cerebral areas, it offers the highest temporal resolution for recording neural behaviors. After EEG preprocessing, the EEG signals are band-passed into sub-slow (0.1‍-‍1 Hz), delta (1‍-‍4 Hz), theta (4‍-‍8 Hz), alpha (8‍-‍13 Hz), beta (13‍-‍30 Hz), and gamma (30‍-‍45 Hz) band oscillations. Then, dynamic functional connectivity is extracted from time-windowed EEG neural oscillations through phase-locking value (PLV) and non-overlapping sliding time windows. Next, average and modal network controllability are implemented on these time-varying brain networks. Based on this preliminary study, it appears that significant differences exist in the dorsolateral frontal-parietal network (FPN), salience network (SN), and default-mode network (DMN). The combination of network controllability and dynamic functional networks offers new insight for characterizing distinctions between awake and asleep stages in the brain. In other words, network controllability captures the underlying brain dynamics under both awake and asleep conditions.