Synergistic and Redundant Brain-Heart Information in Patients with Focal Epilepsy

Abstract

In this work, partial information decomposition (PID) was applied to the time series of heart rate and EEG amplitude variability to investigate the dynamical interactions in brain-heart coupling before and after epileptic seizures. From ECG and EEG signals collected on 23 children suffering from focal epilepsy, the RR intervals and the EEG variance at ipsilateral and contralateral temporal electrodes were computed in four different time windows before and after the seizures. Static PID was used to obtain redundant, unique and synergistic components of the total information shared between the series of RR and EEG variance. Results highlight, in the progression from preictal to postictal states, a statistically significant change of mutual information at the ipsilateral electrode and of the synergy between brain locations.

Connectivity Analysis in EEG Data: A Tutorial Review of the State of the Art and Emerging Trends

“…Concepts of redundancy and synergy have been widely implemented in neuroscience in measures such as II and frameworks such as PID to study multiple interactions [ 206 , 207 , 208 , 209 , 210 ], e.g., in the context of brain–heart interactions [ 211 ], neural spike recordings [ 212 ], resting brains, and epileptic seizures [ 194 , 213 , 214 ]. Moreover, II was applied to human electrocorticography data in [ 185 ], revealing some aspects of multivariate brain interactions that withstand the epileptogenic zone, i.e., where the epileptic seizures are triggered.…”