Cerebral Synchrony Assessment Tutorial: A General Review on Cerebral Signals' Synchronization Estimation Concepts and Methods

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive review of concepts and methods for assessing cerebral synchrony, focusing on phase synchronization as a key tool for evaluating brain connectivity.

Contribution

It offers an extensive overview of existing techniques for measuring cerebral signal synchronization, emphasizing phase synchronization methods for brain connectivity analysis.

Findings

Highlights importance of phase synchronization in brain connectivity

Summarizes various methods for cerebral synchrony assessment

Emphasizes role of synchronization in functional brain integration

Abstract

The human brain is ultimately responsible for all thoughts and movements that the body produces. This allows humans to successfully interact with their environment. If the brain is not functioning properly many abilities of human can be damaged. The goal of cerebral signal analysis is to learn about brain function. The idea that distinct areas of the brain are responsible for specific tasks, the functional segregation, is a key aspect of brain function. Functional integration is an important feature of brain function, it is the concordance of multiple segregated brain areas to produce a unified response. There is an amplified feedback mechanism in the brain called reentry which requires specific timing relations. This specific timing requires neurons within an assembly to synchronize their firing rates. This has led to increased interest and use of phase variables, particularly their synchronization, to measure connectivity in cerebral signals. Herein, we propose a comprehensive review on concepts and methods previously presented for assessing cerebral synchrony, with focus on phase synchronization, as a tool for brain connectivity evaluation.