Improved HHT-microstate analysis of EEG in nicotine addicts

Substance addiction is a chronic disease which causes great harm to modern society and individuals. At present, many studies have applied EEG analysis methods to the substance addiction detection and treatment. As a tool to describe the spatio-temporal dynamic characteristics of large-scale electrophysiological data, EEG microstate analysis has been widely used, which is an effective method to study the relationship between EEG electrodynamics and cognition or disease.

To study the difference of EEG microstate parameters of nicotine addicts at each frequency band, we combine an improved Hilbert Huang Transformation (HHT) decomposition with microstate analysis, which is applied to the EEG of nicotine addicts.

After using improved HHT-Microstate method, we notice that there is significant difference in EEG microstates of nicotine addicts between viewing smoke pictures group (smoke) and viewing neutral pictures group (neutral). Firstly, there is a significant difference in EEG microstates at full-frequency band between smoke and neutral group. Compared with the FIR-Microstate method, the similarity index of microstate topographic maps at alpha and beta bands had significant differences between smoke and neutral group. Secondly, we find significant class × group interactions for microstate parameters at delta, alpha and beta bands. Finally, the microstate parameters at delta, alpha and beta bands obtained by the improved HHT-microstate analysis method are selected as features for classification and detection under the Gaussian kernel support vector machine. The highest accuracy is 92% sensitivity is 94% and specificity is 91%, which can more effectively detect and identify addiction diseases than FIR-Microstate and FIR-Riemann methods.

Thus, the improved HHT-Microstate analysis method can effectively identify substance addiction diseases and provide new ideas and insights for the brain research of nicotine addiction.