Complex tensor factorisation with PARAFAC2 for the estimation of brain connectivity from the EEG

Objective: The coupling between neuronal populations and its magnitude have been shown to be informative for various clinical applications. One method to estimate brain connectivity is with electroencephalography (EEG) from which the cross-spectrum between different sensor locations is derived. We wish to test the efficacy of tensor factorisation in the estimation of brain connectivity. Methods: Complex tensor factorisation based on PARAFAC2 is used to decompose the EEG into scalp components described by the spatial, spectral, and complex trial profiles. An EEG model in the complex domain was derived that shows the suitability of PARAFAC2. A connectivity metric was also derived on the complex trial profiles of the extracted components. Results: Results on a benchmark EEG dataset confirmed that PARAFAC2 can estimate connectivity better than traditional tensor analysis such as PARAFAC within a range of signal-to-noise ratios. The analysis of EEG from patients with mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s disease showed that PARAFAC2 identifies loss of brain connectivity better than traditional approaches and agreeing with prior pathological knowledge. Conclusion: The complex PARAFAC2 algorithm is suitable for EEG connectivity estimation since it allows to extract meaningful coupled sources and provides better estimates than complex PARAFAC. Significance: A new paradigm that employs complex tensor factorisation has demonstrated to be successful in identifying brain connectivity and the location of couples sources for both a benchmark and a real-world EEG dataset. This can enable future applications and has the potential to solve some the issues that deteriorate the performance of traditional connectivity metrics.