Volume conduction effects on the coherence analysis of alcoholic’s EEG

Abstract

An electroencephalography (EEG) coherence function is one of important signal processing too which is used to measure the linear correlation between different regions of the brain. Most of EEG coherence methods applied to examine alcoholic effects on the brain are based on difference of coherence function obtained by comparing the EEG activities of alcoholic and non-alcoholic subjects. However, volume conduction effects of various uncorrelated sources (VCUS) present in the brain introduce the biased estimates into its true value. This study has assessed the importance of minimizing VCUS effects on coherence analysis of alcoholic’s EEG by comparing the coherence methods based on both scalp Laplacian (SL) and EEG. It is important, because most of the studies have interpreted the results of coherence analysis of alcoholic’s EEG without keeping in account the VCUS effects. Results in this study have shown significant effects of VCUS on the statistics of EEG coherence analysis based on the coherence difference of alcoholic and non-alcoholic subjects.