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Reliability and Individual Specificity of EEG Microstate Characteristics

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Abstract

Electroencephalography (EEG) microstates (MSs) are defined as quasi-stable topographies that represent global coherent activation. Alternations in EEG MSs have been reported in numerous neuropsychiatric disorders. Transferring the results of these studies into clinical practice requires not only high reliability but also sufficient individual specificity. Nevertheless, whether the amount of data used in microstate analysis influences reliability and how much individual information is provided by EEG MSs are unclear. In the current study, we aimed to assess the within-subject consistency and between-subject differences in the characteristics of EEG MSs. Two sets of eyes-closed resting-state EEG recordings were collected from 54 young, healthy participants on two consecutive days. The Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices test was conducted to assess general fluid intelligence (gF). We obtained four MSs (labeled A, B, C and D) through EEG microstate analysis. EEG MS characteristics including traditional features (the global explained variances, mean durations, coverages, occurrences and transition probabilities), the Hurst exponents and temporal dynamic features (the autocorrelation functions and the partial autocorrelation functions) were calculated and evaluated. The data with a duration greater than 2 min showed moderate to high reliability and individual specificity. The mean duration and coverage of MS C were significantly correlated with the gF score. The dynamic features showed a higher identification accuracy and were more significantly correlated with gF than the traditional MS features. These findings reveal that EEG microstate characteristics are reliably unique in single subjects and possess abundant inter-individual variability.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the National Center for Protein Sciences at Peking University in Beijing, China, for assistance with data acquisition and data analyses.

Funding

This work was supported by China’s National Strategic Basic Research Program (“973”) grant (2015CB856400), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 81871427, 81671765, 81430037, 81727808, 81790650, 81790651 and 31421003), Beijing Municipal Natural Science Foundation (7172121), National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant Nos. 2018YFC2000603 and 2017YFC0108900), Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission (Grant Nos. Z181100001518005, Z161100002616006 and Z171100000117012), the Guangdong key basic research Grant (2018B030332001) and Guangdong Pearl River Talents Plan (Grant No. 2016ZT06S220).

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Correspondence to Qihong Zou or Jia-Hong Gao.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee (the Institutional Review Board of Peking University #2017-05-01) and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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All the participants provided informed consent.

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Liu, J., Xu, J., Zou, G. et al. Reliability and Individual Specificity of EEG Microstate Characteristics. Brain Topogr 33, 438–449 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10548-020-00777-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10548-020-00777-2

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