Between-Frequency Topographical and Dynamic High-Order Functional Connectivity for Driving Drowsiness Assessment

IEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng. 2019 Mar;27(3):358-367. doi: 10.1109/TNSRE.2019.2893949. Epub 2019 Jan 21.

Abstract

Previous studies exploring driving drowsiness utilized spectral power and functional connectivity without considering between-frequency and more complex synchronizations. To complement such lacks, we explored inter-regional synchronizations based on the topographical and dynamic properties between frequency bands using high-order functional connectivity (HOFC) and envelope correlation. We proposed the dynamic interactions of HOFC, associated-HOFC, and a global metric measuring the aggregated effect of the functional connectivity. The EEG dataset was collected from 30 healthy subjects, undergoing two driving sessions. The two-session setting was employed for evaluating the metric reliability across sessions. Based on the results, we observed reliably significant metric changes, mainly involving the alpha band. In HOFCθα , HOFCαβ , associated- HOFCθα , and associated- HOFCαβ , the connection-level metrics in frontal-central, central-central, and central-parietal/occipital areas were significantly increased, indicating a dominance in the central region. Similar results were also obtained in the HOFCθαβ and aHOFCθαβ . For dynamic-low-order-FC and dynamic-HOFC, the global metrics revealed a reliably significant increment in the alpha, theta-alpha, and alpha-beta bands. Modularity indexes of associated- HOFCα and associated- HOFCθα also exhibited reliably significant differences. This paper demonstrated that within-band and between-frequency topographical and dynamic FC can provide complementary information to the traditional individual-band LOFC for assessing driving drowsiness.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Alpha Rhythm / physiology
  • Automobile Driving / psychology*
  • Beta Rhythm / physiology
  • Cerebral Cortex / physiology
  • Electroencephalography / methods
  • Female
  • Healthy Volunteers
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Neural Pathways / physiology
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Sleepiness*
  • Theta Rhythm / physiology
  • Young Adult