| 英文摘要: | 1545668(Vaina)
The PI will develop a novel real-time, magnetoencephalography based neurofeedback method designed to rehabilitate deficits on executive functions such as decision making, switching attention, search, and error correction. Benefits of this work encompass scientific understanding, methodological trailblazing, with significant impact on both dimensions and an opening of a new, more optimistic, era in the neurorehabilitation of executive functions which will improve the quality of life of impaired individuals. It is important to emphasize that although this application focuses on training executive functions in the aging population, principles derived via the proposed training, will lead to neurorehabilitation of executive functions deficits in other populations such as stroke, traumatic brain injuries, and in individuals afflicted by psychiatric or developmental disorders. Undergraduate and graduate students in science and engineering will benefit from hands-on involvement in the project, providing them with an understanding of how engineering methods can contribute to human neuroscience of cognitive rehabilitation.
This project has two related goals. First it aims to develop a novel and transformative neuro-therapeutic intervention, State-modulating neurofeedback (smNFB), which will provide rapid modulation of cortical activity targeting training dynamic brain functions typical of Executive Functions (EF). The expected outcome of the training is increased speed to switch spatial attention in the trained task. Novel algorithms and simulations will be implemented to assure that the smNFB method effectively provides real time neurofeedback (rt-NFB) useful as a neurotherapeutic protocol. This method is innovative and, if successful, will significantly contribute to the success of neurorehabilitation targeting deficits in EF. The second goal is to monitor changes in cortical activation and dynamic connectivity as a function of smNFB training. It is expected that smNFB training will affect the strength of activation and the timing of connectivity in the frontoparietal network involved in executive control of attention. Functional connectivity between candidate cortical areas will be assessed through an extension of the dynamic Granger Causality methods developed in the PI laboratory, which measures how the magnitude of directed functional connectivity between cortical areas evolves temporally during training. Thus the second innovation of this project is that it provides a multifaceted quantitative neuroscientific validation of the proposed smNFB method and how it affects the spatiotemporal patterns of cortical processing. A third innovation of this project is a unique way for assessing efficacy of the neurofeedback cue within subject, which is highly relevant for efficacy testing of all neurofeedback paradigms in patient populations whose performance and response to rehabilitation are often very variable and inconsistent. The project will provide open source software tools for the scientific community, following gold-standard guidelines for sharing software (March 2014 Editorial of Nature Methods). These tools will be integrated in the Brain Storm toolbox which is a free and widely used MEG/EEG data analysis software package written in Matlab as will be the algorithms developed under the proposed research. |