Investigating neuromagnetic brain responses against chromatic flickering stimuli by wavelet entropies.
BACKGROUND
Photosensitive epilepsy is a type of reflexive epilepsy triggered by various visual stimuli including colourful ones. Despite the ubiquitous presence of colorful displays, brain responses against different colour combinations are not properly studied.


RESULTS
Here, we studied the photosensitivity of the human brain against three types of chromatic flickering stimuli by recording neuromagnetic brain responses (magnetoencephalogram, MEG) from nine adult controls, an unmedicated patient, a medicated patient, and two controls age-matched with patients. Dynamical complexities of MEG signals were investigated by a family of wavelet entropies. Wavelet entropy is a newly proposed measure to characterize large scale brain responses, which quantifies the degree of order/disorder associated with a multi-frequency signal response. In particular, we found that as compared to the unmedicated patient, controls showed significantly larger wavelet entropy values. We also found that Renyi entropy is the most powerful feature for the participant classification. Finally, we also demonstrated the effect of combinational chromatic sensitivity on the underlying order/disorder in MEG signals.


CONCLUSIONS
Our results suggest that when perturbed by potentially epileptic-triggering stimulus, healthy human brain manages to maintain a non-deterministic, possibly nonlinear state, with high degree of disorder, but an epileptic brain represents a highly ordered state which making it prone to hyper-excitation. Further, certain colour combination was found to be more threatening than other combinations.
Bhagat
Mayank
M
Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India.
Bhushan
Chitresh
C
Saha
Goutam
G
Shimjo
Shinsuke
S
Watanabe
Katsumi
K
Bhattacharya
Joydeep
J
D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000378:metabolism / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D003116:Color; D004569:Electroencephalography / Q000379:methods; D019277:Entropy; D020195:Epilepsy, Reflex / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000473:pathology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D009682:Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy / Q000379:methods*; D015225:Magnetoencephalography / Q000379:methods; D008297:Male; D008959:Models, Neurological; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted