The eLORETA-ICA procedure was described in detail in our previous study
25 ,30 (link),31 (link). Briefly, eLORETA first reconstructs cortical electrical activities from scalp EEG recordings
27 , and then ICA decomposes cortical electrical activities into physiological RSN activities and artifact activities. eLORETA is a linear weighted minimum norm inverse solution, which has the property of correct localization albeit with low spatial resolution
23 (link),26 (link),27 . eLORETA estimates electrical activity of 6239 voxels in the cortical gray matter at a spatial resolution of 5 × 5 × 5 mm
3, using a realistic head model
67 (link) with MNI152 template
68 (link). eLORETA is a freeware which can be downloaded from
https://www.uzh.ch/keyinst/loreta and the version (v20171030) was used in this manuscript. eLORETA has been widely used to explore cortical electrical activities and its validity has been proven in healthy subjects and neuropsychiatric patients
24 ,25 ,34 (link),64 (link). eLORETA cortical electrical activities were calculated in the following five frequency bands: delta (2–4 Hz), theta (4–8 Hz), alpha (8–13 Hz), beta (13–30 Hz), and gamma (30–60 Hz). ICA is a mathematical method that precisely decomposes a mixture of non-Gaussian signals such as EEG and MEG data into independent signals (i.e., physiological and artifact signals)
44 (link),45 . In order to decompose eLORETA cortical electrical activity into a set of maximally independent activities across a population of subjects, group ICA was applied in the eLORETA-ICA analysis
69 . Finally, a set of RSNs was obtained by maximizing the independence among RSNs, where independence was calculated by fourth-order cumulant
44 (link),45 . Then, RSNs were ordered based on total power and colour coded for each frequency band. In the colour-coded map, red and blue represent an increase and decrease in power, respectively, with increasing RSN activity. In this study, in order to calculate RSN activities of AD and ADMCI patients relative to those of healthy subjects, we assumed that AD, ADMCI and healthy subjects all share the same spatial and frequency configurations of EEG-RSNs and used the 11 independent components (five EEG-RSNs and six artifact activities) derived from 80 healthy subjects in our previous study
25 . Once a set of independent components is determined, eLORETA-ICA can calculate the corresponding activity of each RSN for each piece of eLORETA data. The correction of healthy age-related changes in EEG-RSN activities was performed by linear regression analysis implemented in eLORETA software, where the option of log-transformation of age was selected. The output of the linear regression analysis was a z-score, which shows how much the age-corrected RSN activities deviate from the mean RSN activities of healthy subjects, with the standard deviation being used as the unit of measurement. Figures
1,
2 and
3 were generated by the eLORETA viewer and Figs.
4 and
5 were generated by MS Excel.
Aoki Y., Takahashi R., Suzuki Y., Pascual-Marqui R.D., Kito Y., Hikida S., Maruyama K., Hata M., Ishii R., Iwase M., Mori E, & Ikeda M. (2023). EEG resting-state networks in Alzheimer’s disease associated with clinical symptoms. Scientific Reports, 13, 3964.