Abstract
This paper presents an investigation about the effects of mental stress on prefrontal cortex (PFC) subregions using simultaneous measurement of functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) and Electroencephalography (EEG) signals. The aim is to explore canonical correlation analysis (CCA) technique to study the relationship among the bi-modality signals in mental stress assessment, and how we could fuse the signals for better accuracy in stress detection. Twenty-five male healthy subjects participated in the study while performing mental arithmetic task under control and stress (under time pressure with negative feedback) conditions. The fusion of brain signals acquired by fNIRS-EEG was performed at feature-level using CCA by maximizing the inter-subject covariance across modalities. The CCA result discovered the associations across the modalities and estimated the components responsible for these associations. The experiment results showed that mental stress experienced by this cohort of subjects is subregion specific and localized to the right ventrolateral PFC subregion. These suggest the right ventrolateral PFC as a suitable candidate region to extract biomarkers as performance indicators of neurofeedback training in stress coping.
Highlights
Mental stress is one of the risk factors for neuropsychiatric disorders such as bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, anxiety and depression [1,2,3]
We propose canonical correlation analysis (CCA) method as a vehicle to assess the effects of mental stress on prefrontal cortical activity
This study investigated the effects of mental stress on prefrontal cortex (PFC) subregions based on simultaneous measurement of EEG and functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) signals
Summary
Mental stress is one of the risk factors for neuropsychiatric disorders such as bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, anxiety and depression [1,2,3]. Animal and human studies have demonstrated detrimental effects of glucocorticoids (stress hormone) on PFC functioning [7] and identified it as the brain region susceptive to mental stress. A variety of external stress treatments [8,9] have shown the potential to remedy the PFC functioning in animals and human subjects, e.g. in post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) neurofeedback has been used as a potential means of treatments and assessments in the clinical practice. Recent findings suggest that NF could be used as an alternative treatment for young children with attention-deficit disorders. Most of these studies were hardly translated from cognitive neuroscience lab into clinical practices due to lack of effectiveness in modulating the brain training activities.
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