PhD Guido Nolte | Understanding Phase Amplitude Coupling from Bi-spectral Analysis

Guest Lecture

  • Date: Jun 21, 2018
  • Time: 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: PhD Guido Nolte
  • Dept. of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany
  • Location: MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
  • Room: Wilhelm Wundt Room (A400)
  • Host: Department of Neurology
This is a mostly conceptual talk about how to estimate cross-frequency-coupling

observable in electrophysiological data like EEG/MEG/LFP.

Measures of phase-amplitude-coupling (PAC), e.g. to observe coupling

between theta and gamma rhythms, attract many researchers. Here is my main message:

forget that method and rather calculate bicoherence, the normalized version of a bispectrum.

Bicoherence has an optimal frequency resolution with easy detection of higher harmonics,

the computational cost is hundreds of times of lower, and there is nothing which will be missed

in comparison to standard measures of PAC. In essence, bicoherence is Cinderella, waiting for her true

values to be acknowledged.

In the application part of this talk I present results for localizing univariate bicoherence

in the brain representing alpha-beta coupling. The main points for resting state EEG data are:

a) at high alpha, bicoherence is detected in motor areas, which is not detectable using power, and b)

schizophrenic patients are significantly different from healthy controls.
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