We computed Higuchi's fractal dimension (FD) of resting, eyes closed EEG recorded from 30 scalp locations in 18 male neuroleptic-naïve, recent-onset schizophrenia (NRS) subjects and 15 male healthy control (HC) subjects, who were group-matched for age. Schizophrenia patients showed a diffuse reduction of FD except in the bilateral temporal and occipital regions, with the reduction being most prominent bifrontally. The positive symptom (PS) schizophrenia subjects showed FD values similar to or even higher than HC in the bilateral temporo-occipital regions, along with a co-existent bifrontal FD reduction as noted in the overall sample of NRS. In contrast, this increase in FD values in the bilateral temporo-occipital region was absent in the negative symptom (NS) subgroup. The regional differences in complexity suggested by these findings may reflect the aberrant brain dynamics underlying the pathophysiology of schizophrenia and its symptom dimensions. Higuchi's method of measuring FD directly in the time domain provides an alternative for the more computationally intensive nonlinear methods of estimating EEG complexity.

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We consider the problem of event-related desynchronization (ERD) estimation. In existing approaches, model parameters are usually found manually through experimentation, a tedious task that often leads to suboptimal estimates. We propose an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for model parameter estimation that is fully automatic and gives optimal estimates. Further, we apply a Kalman smoother to obtain ERD estimates. Results show that the EM algorithm significantly improves the performance of the Kalman smoother. Application of the proposed approach to the motor-imagery EEG data shows that useful ERD patterns can be obtained even without careful selection of frequency bands.

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