, CORRELATION ANALYSIS OF EEG CHANNELS 193 problems we have seen so far wi due to the need to detect simil: and cross-correlation technique needs. th the single-channel ECG and carotid pulse signals. ar events across multiple channels. Autocorrelation s in both the time and frequency domains serve such 44.1 Detection of EEG rhythms Problem: Propose a method to detect the presence of the a rhythm in an EEG channel. How would you extend the method to detect the presence of the same rhythm simultaneously in two EEG channels? __ Solution: Two signals may be compared to detect common characteristics present in them via their dot product (also known as the inner or scalar product), defined as. N-1 SY xlnpy(n), (4.20) AZO zy = (zy) where the signals z(n) and y(n) have N’ samples each. The dot product represents the projection of one signal onto the other, with each signal being viewed as an N-dimensional vector. The dot product may be normalized by the geometric mean of the energies of the two signals to obtain a correlation coefficient as [67} (4.21) The means of the signals may be subtracted out, if desired, as in Equation 318. In the case of tWo continuous-time si signal onto the other is detined as (4.22) When a shift or time delay may be present in the occurrence of the epoch of interest in the (wo signals being compared, it becomes necessary to introduce a time-shift parameter to compute the projection for every possible position of overlap. The shift parameter facilitates searching one signal for the occurrence of an event matching that in the other signal at any time instant within the available uation of the signals, The cross-correlation function (CCF) between two signals for a shift or delay of 7 seconds or k samples may be obtained as bey(r) f. a(t)ult + r)dt, or (423) Bay(k) = SY e(n)y(n +k). (4.24) The range of summation in the latter case needs to be limited to the range of the available overlapped data. A scale factor, depending upon the number of data samples \g2@0020200228228220828282282282282888 02282 *% % & && oo @ @ @ 4194 EVENT DETECTION used, needs to be introduced to obtain the true CCF, but will be neglected here (see Section 6.4). An extended version of the correlation coefficient yey in Equation 4.21. to include time shift, is provided in Equation 3.18. . . When the ACF or the CCF are computed for various shifts, a question arises about the data samples in one of the signal segments beyond the duration of the other. Ne may add zeros to one of the signals and increase its length by the maximum shift of interest, or we may use the true data samples from the original signal record. if available. The latter method was used wherever possible in the following illustrations. In the case of random signals, we need to take the expectation or sample average of the outer product of the vectors formed by the available samples of the signals. Let x(n) = {2(n),e(n-1),...,2(n-N+1)]? and y(n) = [y(n), y(n — 1),--.y(n— N +1)? represent the N-dimensional vectorial form of the two signals z(n) and y(n) with the most-recent N samples being available in each signal at the time instant n. If x(n) and y(n) are sample observations of random processes, their CCF is defined as ©., = E[x(n)y7(n)j, (4.25) in a manner similar to what we saw in Equations 3.78 and 3.79. The outer product. which is an. N x N matrix, provides the cross-terms that include all possible delays (shifts) within the duration of the signals. All of the equations above may be modified to obtain the ACF by replacing the second signal y with the first signal z. The signal x is then compared with itself. The ACF displays peaks at intervals corresponding to the period (and integral multiples thereof) of any periodic or repetitive pattern present in the signal. This property facilitates the detection of rhythms in signals such as the EEG: the presence of the a rhythm would be indicated by a peak in the neighborhood of 0.1 s. The ACF of most signals decays and reaches negligible values after delays of a few milliseconds, except for periodic signals of infinite or indefinite duration for which the ACF will also exhibit periodic peaks. The ACF will also exhibit multiple peaks when the same event repeats itself at regular or irregular intervals. One may need to compute the ACF only up to certain delay limits depending upon the expected characteristics of the signal being analyzed. The CCF displays peaks at the period of any periodic pattern present in both of the signals being analyzed. The CCF may therefore be used to detect common thythms present between two signals, for example, between two channels of the EEG. When one of the functions being used to compute the CCF is a template representing an event, such as an ECG cycle as in the illustration in Section 3.3.1 or an EEG spike-and-wave complex as in Section 4.4.2, the procedure is known as template matching. ° Illustration of application: Figure 4.8 shows, in the upper trace, the ACF of a segment of the p4 channel of the EEG in Figure 1.22 over the time interval 4.67 — 5.81 s, The ACF displays peaks at time delays of 0.11 s and its integral multiples. The inverse of the delay of the first peak corresponds to 9 Hz, which is within the @ rhythm range. (The PSD in the lower trace of Figure 4.8 and the others to follow will be described in Section 4,5.) It is therefore obvious that the signalCORRELATION ANALYSIS OF EEG CHANNELS 195 se; analyz ains i wei eee thee thythm. A simple peak-search algorithm may be CF to detect the presence aks at specific del: f Svertheestineraageat the AGE Presence of peaks at specific delays of interest or Autocorrelation Lia fd On O15 02 025 os 0.35 a4 0.45 Delay in seconds f \ | NA 4 \ y Wa i Loy ee zi 0 5 10 15 20 25 Froquency in Hz Figure 4.8 Upper trace: ACF of the 4.67 ~ 5.81 8 portion of the p4 channel of the EEG signal shown in Figure 1.22, Lower trace’ The PSD of the signal segment in dB, given by the Fourier transform of the ACF. To contrast with the preceding example, the upper trace of Figure 4.9 shows the ACF of the 4.2 — 4.96 s segment of the £3 channel of the EEG in Figure 1.22. The ACF shows no peak in the 0.08 — 1.25 s region, indicating absence of the a rhythm in the segment analyzed. Figures 4.10, 4.11, and 4.12 illustrate the CCF results comparing the following G signal shown in Figure 1,2? in order: the p3 and p4 channels 5.71 s when both channels exhibit the @ rhythm; the 02 and c4 channels over the duration 5.71 — 6.78 s when the former has the a rhythm but not the latter channel; and the f3 and f4 channels over the duration 4.13 ~ 4.96 s when neither channel has a activity. The relative strengths of the peaks in the a range, as described earlier, agree with the joint presence, singular presence. or absence of the a rhythm in the various segments (channels) analyzed. portions of the EE over the duration 4.72 —