EEG Research

RATIONALE Pain is subjective, which can lead to a host of issues (under/over reporting, malinguering, non-verbal, cognitive impairment, powering research studies)

BACKGROUND EEG basics--neuronal firing, field potentials, signal processing (downsampling, Nyquist sampling theory, band-pass filters, FFT, artifact removal), power bands (delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma), spectral analysis (BIS), sources of artifact Gamma frequency has been shown to correlate with sensory stimulus/pain intensity, but is also the primary band for muscle artifact (10-200 fold decrease in gamma after paralysis), thus potentially contaminating prior data. Pain protocols typically are either tonic (thermal) or phasic (laser pulse).

METHODS

RESULTS

DISCUSSION

Questions: Infomax is an ICA algorithm that iteratively adjusts the mixing matrix to maximize mutual information via gradient ascent optimization. Mutual information--the amount of information that can be obtained about one random variable through another random variable. Mixing matrix--