3.2. Experimental process and steps
The data processing software used in this experiment is MATLAB, and the sampling frequency of the data is 1200
. The MEG data are pre-processed by artifact removal, baseline correction, and spm8 filtering. The specific processing was as follows: for each subject’s acquired data, a band-pass filter was used to obtain a signal from 0.1
-200
, remove 50
of industrial frequency noise, and finally obtain a three-dimensional matrix of 275*161*80. 275 represents the 275 channels of magnetoencephalography acquisition, 161 represents the data sampling points, and 80 represents the number of each picture type. The duration of the stimulus was 600ms, with intervals of 650ms to 800ms, and the 3 types of pictures were randomly displayed on the screen in front of the subjects. In this experiment, we first analyzed the subjects’
-wave (0.5-4
),
-wave (4-8
),
-wave (8-13
),
-wave (13-30
) and full frequency band using nuclear Granger causality, and finally found significant differences in the
-band brain magnetic signals (13-30
) of the two groups. All the MEG signals in this paper were collected under positive, neutral, and negative emotional picture stimuli given to the subjects. In the study by Bahar Güntekin [
18,
19] et al, they found that on the response amplitude of different bands in human electroencephalogram a significant increase in the response amplitude in the
band when processing facial emotional picture stimuli, which was the most active compared to other bands. In our study, we found that the
-band response amplitude was significantly higher when subjects processed facial emotional picture stimuli and triggered higher beta oscillations in response to negative emotional stimuli. Based on this, our studies in the following are based on
-band MEG signals.
The brain can be divided into five brain regions, namely: frontal region (F), parietal region (P), occipital region (O), temporal region (T), and central region (C). As shown in
Figure 1, the CTF275 magnetoencephalography system further divides these 5 brain regions into left and right, or left, middle, and right.
When selecting the embedding dimension m of polynomial kernel function, since Glenmorangie distillery causality is based on the theory of regression model, we use the AIC(Akaike information criteria) information criterion when selecting the embedding dimension
m. AIC is a method proposed by Akaike[
20] et al. to obtain the order of a time series analysis model. While encouraging good data fitting, it is necessary to avoid overfitting as much as possible, so that the model with the minimum AIC function is considered the optimal model. The expression of the AIC criterion used in this experiment is[
21]:
where,
p is the dimension of the variable, ∑ is the Covariance matrix of the prediction error obtained by
m-order regression, and
n is the length of the time series. In this experiment, we determined the order m of the model using the AIC information criterion, and calculated the model order from 1 to 20. We found that when
m=4, both groups of people had smaller AIC values. Therefore, we chose to embed the dimension
. When determining the value of
p, two groups of channels were randomly selected in the occipital and frontal regions of depressed patients and healthy people, and
p=1-6 was taken for calculation. It was found that when
p=2, the polynomial Glenmorangie distillery causality strength between the two groups of channels reached the peak. In order to avoid over fitting problems due to excessive index selection, we selected
p=2 in the subsequent analysis.
After averaging the channels in 14 brain regions, the polynomial kernel Granger causality parameters m=4 and p=2 were fixed, and calculate the Granger causality values of polynomial kernels between two of 14 brain regions in 11 depressed patients and 5 healthy individuals under 3 mood stimuli:positive, neutral, and negative, respectively, to obtain a 14*14 polynomial kernel Granger causality intensity matrix. The polynomial kernel Granger causal index matrix was averaged separately for the 2 populations,then we obtained the average Granger causal weight matrix for the 2-class population under the three emotional stimuli. The independent sample t-test was then conducted, and the results are shown in Table 1. From the table, it can be seen that under negative and neutral stimuli, the p-value is less than 0.05, and there is a significant difference between depressed patients and healthy people, specifically, the mean Granger causality values between 14 brain regions of depressed patients are greater than those of healthy people, and under positive stimuli, there is no significant difference between the two groups of people.
Table 1.
Independent sample t-test of Glenmorangie distillery causality mean of polynomial kernel between 14 brain regions of two groups.
Table 1.
Independent sample t-test of Glenmorangie distillery causality mean of polynomial kernel between 14 brain regions of two groups.
|
Depression |
Normal |
t |
p |
]1*Positive stimulus |
0.1155±0.0041 |
0.1158±0.0041 |
0.040 |
0.968 |
]1*Neutral stimulus |
0.1198±0.0041 |
0.1154±0.0041 |
20.158 |
0.000 |
]1*Negative stimulus |
0.1211±0.0041 |
0.1157±0.0041 |
21.573 |
0.000 |
Before constructing a brain network, we need to select a suitable threshold value. The selection of threshold T has been a difficult point in brain network research, which can directly affect the statistics and analysis of topological properties in brain networks. There is no universally applicable threshold selection method, and the following three principles will be referred to for threshold selection in this paper [
22,
23]: (1)The threshold value shall be chosen to ensure as much as possible the complete connectivity of the network, meaning that there are no or very few isolated nodes in the network; (2)The threshold needs to be chosen to ensure as much as possible the small-world nature of the network, so that it has a high global efficiency and a low local efficiency; (3)Thresholds are selected to reflect differences between groups whenever possible. The threshold range was set between 0.11 and 0.13, and a threshold was taken every 0.001. According to the above principles of threshold selection, the two groups of people were analyzed, and the final selected threshold was T=0.115 to generate the adjacency matrix. To further observe the specific differential brain areas of the two populations under negative and neutral stimuli, we drew the adjacency matrix of the difference between healthy and depressed individuals. As shown in
Figure 3, where blue squares represent the existence of causal effects between the two brain regions corresponding to the coordinates at that location in depressed individuals, while no connections exist in healthy individuals; yellow squares represent the existence of causal effects between the two brain regions corresponding to the coordinates at that location in healthy individuals, while no connections exist at that location in depressed individuals, and green squares represent the consistency between the two populations in the two brain regions corresponding to the coordinates at that location. i.e., both or neither has a causal effect.
As can be seen from the figure, under negative stimulation, depressed patients had more causal interactions with other brain regions in RF (right frontal), LO (left occipital), and RO (right occipital) brain regions and higher degrees of connectivity than healthy individuals and healthy individuals had higher degrees of connectivity in LP (left parietal) and LC (left central) regions than depressed patients; under neutral stimulation, depressed patients had higher degrees of connectivity in LO (left occipital), RF (right frontal) and RO (right occipital ) and other brain regions in depressed patients, and in LP (left parietal) and ZC (central region) in healthy subjects. This result suggests that under non-positive emotional stimuli, depressed individuals show more causal connections and closer information exchange with other brain regions in the frontal and occipital regions compared to healthy individuals, who show more causal effects in the parietal and central regions. The frontal lobe is closely related to the regulation of human emotions, and depressed patients have significant abnormalities in the frontal lobe compared to healthy individuals when processing negative stimuli[
24]. The occipital lobe, as the primary processing area of the brain for visual stimuli, is mainly involved in the processing of facial emotions, and it has been shown that depressed patients have abnormal activation of the occipital lobe in response to negative facial emotional stimuli[
25] and that depressed patients have hyperfocused occipital areas on negative stimuli. The parietal region is mainly responsible for the integration of visual and spatial information, and some studies have shown that healthy people have higher neurotransmitter activation in the parietal region than depressed patients, and neurotransmitters are the main substances that transmit information between neurons, and high neurotransmitter activation in the parietal region of healthy people indicates that healthy people have more information exchange and more intense activity in the parietal region with other brain regions[
26], which is consistent with the conclusion obtained in this paper that healthy people have more causal role consistent with the conclusion obtained in this paper that healthy individuals have a more causal role in parietal regions. Based on the above basis, we constructed brain networks at a threshold value of T=0.115 for the magnetic brain signals of depressed patients and healthy individuals, respectively, as shown in
Figure 4,
Figure 5, and
Figure 6. From the figure, we can see that the brain network connections are tighter in depressed patients compared with healthy individuals under negative and neutral stimuli. Due to a large number of nodes, we cannot visually observe the topological properties of the network from the network diagram, so we will find the changes in topological properties of the two groups under different emotional stimuli by analyzing the average degree of the network, the average clustering coefficient, and the characteristic path length index in the small-world property.
Figure 7 and
Figure 8 show the error bar graphs of the mean degree and mean clustering coefficients of the two populations under the 3 emotional stimuli: negative, neutral, and positive, respectively. From
Figure 7, it can be seen that the mean degree of depressed patients was higher than that of healthy individuals under negative and neutral stimuli, and both passed the independent samples t-test (
p=0.008), while under positive stimuli, the two groups did not show significant differences. This result suggests that the connections between brain network nodes are stronger in depressed patients under non-positive emotional picture stimuli and that the causal effects between brain regions are significantly enhanced in depressed patients when processing negative stimuli. From
Figure 8, we can find that the mean clustering coefficients were higher in healthy individuals under all three emotional stimuli, and all passed the independent samples t-test with
p=0.034 under negative stimuli,
p=0.028 under neutral stimuli, and
p=0.011 under positive stimuli, indicating a higher degree of grouping in the brain network of healthy individuals.
From
Figure 9, it can be seen that depressed patients had the greatest mean under negative stimuli and the least under positive stimuli and passed the independent sample t-test (
p=0.003), while healthy individuals did not differ significantly under the 3 emotional stimuli. As can be seen in
Figure 10, depressed patients had the largest mean clustering coefficient under negative stimuli and the smallest under positive stimuli, and passed the independent samples t-test (
p=0.015), while the mean clustering coefficient did not change significantly in healthy individuals under different emotional stimuli. This result suggests that depressed patients differed more in different brain networks under different emotional stimuli, which may be due to the fact that depressed patients are more prone to emotions.
A small-world network is a network with a high clustering coefficient and short characteristic path length, and the small-world property can be characterized by calculating the small-world coefficient. The characteristic path length of a network is the average of the shortest path lengths that all nodes in the network need to travel to connect. In this paper, we observed the changes in the brain networks of depressed and healthy people by calculating the deviation of the network’s characteristic path length under positive, neutral, and negative stimuli compared to the characteristic path length of a random small-world network model. Fifty small-world networks were randomly constructed and their characteristic path lengths Ls were calculated. The mean path lengths L were calculated for depressed patients and healthy people under three emotional stimuli at different thresholds and the degree of deviation of the two populations under different emotional stimuli compared to the small-world networks was observed by calculating the value of L/Ls. If the value of L/Ls is closer to 1, it indicates that the characteristic path length of the network is close to that of the small-world network.
Figure 11 shows the comparison of the L/Ls values of the two groups under three different emotional stimuli, * represents p<0.05 after using the independent samples t-test. it can be seen from the figure that the L/Ls values of the brain network of depressed patients are greater than 1 under both negative and neutral stimuli at different thresholds and have a tendency to continue to increase, indicating that the characteristic path length of the brain network of depressed patients has a significant deviation from the small world property. In contrast, the L/Ls values of the brain networks of depressed patients and healthy individuals did not differ significantly under positive stimuli and were both close to 1, indicating that the brain networks of the two groups were close to the small-world network under positive stimuli. This result indicates that the brain network characteristic path lengths of depressed patients significantly deviated from the small-world property under negative and neutral stimuli, and the changes in the brain network of depressed patients were more pronounced, while the brain network of healthy individuals was close to the small-world network property under the three emotional stimuli.