Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons^™

Neural Processing Of Semantic Content In Movies, Maximilian Nentwich

Dissertations and Theses

Naturalistic stimuli, such as movies, contain interacting, multimodal and semantic features and allow for free exploration through eye movements. The full extent of neural responses to features such as motion, film cuts and eye movement behavior has not been established. The main hypothesis of this thesis is that complex multimodal and semantic stimuli in naturalistic movies engage a widespread ensemble of locations across the entire brain. To address this question I analyzed simultaneous intracranial and eyetracking data from over 6,000 electrodes across 23 patients with intractable epilepsy. Responses to fast eye movements – saccades – and film cuts are widespread …

Individual Variability Of Functional Connectivity In Resting-State And Naturalistic Fmri Paradigms, Mark O'Reilly

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies are criticized for their lack of control over cognitive states of individuals during observation, which may lead to increased variability in estimates of functional connectivity (FC). Engaging movies have been used in an attempt to synchronize the cognitive states of individuals during the scan, potentially reducing intersubject variability in connectivity estimates. The objective of this study was to investigate the differences in intersubject variability of FC between rest and movie conditions in a healthy cohort. The results demonstrate widespread reductions of intersubject variability of FC in the movie condition compared to the resting-state …

Brain Connectivity Networks For The Study Of Nonlinear Dynamics And Phase Synchrony In Epilepsy, Hoda Rajaei

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Assessing complex brain activity as a function of the type of epilepsy and in the context of the 3D source of seizure onset remains a critical and challenging endeavor. In this dissertation, we tried to extract the attributes of the epileptic brain by looking at the modular interactions from scalp electroencephalography (EEG). A classification algorithm is proposed for the connectivity-based separation of interictal epileptic EEG from normal. Connectivity patterns of interictal epileptic discharges were investigated in different types of epilepsy, and the relation between patterns and the epileptogenic zone are also explored in focal epilepsy.

A nonlinear recurrence-based method is …

Funtional Near Infrared Spectroscopy Study Of Language, Joint Attention And Motor Skills, Ujwal Chaudhary

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is an emerging non-invasive optical neuro imaging technique that monitors the hemodynamic response to brain activation with ms-scale temporal resolution and sub-cm spatial resolution. The overall goal of my dissertation was to develop and apply NIRS towards investigation of neurological response to language, joint attention and planning and execution of motor skills in healthy adults. Language studies were performed to investigate the hemodynamic response, synchrony and dominance feature of the frontal and fronto-temporal cortex of healthy adults in response to language reception and expression. The mathematical model developed based on granger causality explicated the directional flow …