Neurally adjusted ventilatory assist (NAVA) mode as an adjunct diagnostic tool in congenital central hypoventilation syndrome.

A full term female newborn was admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) for continuous observation of apnea. Infant was noted to have apnea while asleep requiring intubation and mechanical ventilation. A video EEG was performed which demonstrated normal awake background without any seizure activity.

Clinical Reasoning: a girl presenting with stiffness episodes during sleep, cafe-au-lait spots, and flecked retina.

A 4-year-old girl who had been born of normal pregnancy and delivery and had an unremarkable family or personal history was referred to a neuropsychiatric department because of the appearance of peculiar nocturnal episodes. Parents described that their child abruptly became stiff during sleep. These episodes usually ranged from 20 to 40 seconds, and after that the child continued to sleep.

Consciousness and depth of anesthesia assessment based on Bayesian analysis of EEG signals.

This study applies Bayesian techniques to analyze EEG signals for the assessment of the consciousness and depth of anesthesia (DoA). This method takes the limiting large-sample normal distribution as posterior inferences to implement the Bayesian paradigm. The maximum a posterior (MAP) is applied to denoise the wavelet coefficients based on a shrinkage function.

Importance of diazepam administration during electroencephalography in the differential diagnosis of cortical visual loss.

A 14-year-old boy presented with acute visual loss due to cortical blindness. Two weeks after the visual symptoms, the patient developed behavioral abnormalities. Brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) revealed hyperintense lesions at parieto-occipital lobes on T2-weighted and fluid attenuated inversion recovery images.

A review on epilepsy in the horse and the potential of Ambulatory EEG as a diagnostic tool.

Epilepsy in the horse is diagnosed based on clinical signs, but diagnosing can be difficult if a grand mal is not present. The future prospects of the horse and potentially the safety of the owner depend on an accurate diagnosis. This review presents information on epilepsy and focuses on the diagnostic potential of (Ambulatory) electroencephalography ((A) EEG).

Acquired auditory agnosia in childhood and normal sleep electroencephalography subsequently diagnosed as Landau-Kleffner syndrome: a report of three cases.

Aim:   We report three cases of Landau-Kleffner syndrome (LKS) in children (two females, one male) in whom diagnosis was delayed because the sleep electroencephalography (EEG) was initially normal.

Method:   Case histories including EEG, positron emission tomography findings, and long-term outcome were reviewed.

Results:   Auditory agnosia occurred between the age of 2 years and 3 years 6 months, after a period of normal language development.

Stochastic generation of gamma-band activity in primary visual cortex of awake and anesthetized monkeys.

Oscillatory neural activity within the gamma band (25-90 Hz) is generally thought to be able to provide a timing signal for harmonizing neural computations across different brain regions. Using time-frequency analyses of the dynamics of gamma-band activity in the local field potentials recorded from monkey primary visual cortex, we found identical temporal characteristics of gamma activity in both awake and anesthetized brain states, including large variability of peak frequency, brief oscillatory epochs (<100 ms on average), and stochastic statistics of the incidence and duration of oscillatory events. These findings indicate that gamma-band activity is temporally unstructured and is inherently a stochastic signal generated by neural networks.

Evolution of Ohtahara syndrome to continuous spikes and waves during slow sleep in an infant.

Encephalopathy with electrical status epilepticus in sleep (ESES) is defined as an age-related and self-limited electroclinical syndrome whose etiology is unknown and characterized by continuous spikes and waves during slow sleep (CSWS). Typical CSWS starts at an age of 4 to 5 years and ends by an average of 11 years. We report on an unexpected finding of CSWS in an 18-month-old male whose previous EEG at age 45 days was grossly abnormal with the presence of a burst suppression pattern during wakefulness and sleep.

Losing the struggle to stay awake: divergent thalamic and cortical activity during microsleeps.

Maintaining alertness is critical for safe and successful performance of most human activities. Consequently, microsleeps during continuous visuomotor tasks, such as driving, can be very serious, not only disrupting performance but sometimes leading to injury or death due to accidents. We have investigated the neural activity underlying behavioral microsleeps--brief (0.

Acquired epileptiform opercular syndrome: F-18 fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) findings and efficacy of levetiracetam therapy.

We report a five-year-old girl presenting with dysphagia, dysarthria, drooling, and generalized tonic convulsions in whom the final diagnosis was acquired epileptiform opercular syndrome. Levetiracetam monotherapy at a dosage of 40 mg/kg/day improved the clinical findings, and seizures were controlled at the end of the first month of treatment. Six months after the initial diagnosis, she presented with speech deterioration and dysarthria.

Case of syndrome of headache with neurological deficits and cerebrospinal fluid lymphocytosis (HaNDL) with focal slowing on electroencephalogram.

We describe a case of headache and neurological deficits with cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) lymphocytosis in a patient presenting with a 3-week history of recurrent severe headaches associated with negative sensory symptoms and dysphasia. The patient had no cardiovascular risk factors and no family history of migraines. Neurological examination was unremarkable.

EEG maturation: viability through adolescence.

As our brain matures, the EEG patterns change in a predictable manner These cortical developments create age-specific waveforms that help decipher the normal maturation of the EEG. The majority of these changes take place during the neonatal period when waveform alterations occur week to week from discontinuous bursts to a more continuous background. From the neonatal period to infancy, background patterns of sleep and awake begin to show the continuity seen in older children and adults.

Effects of daytime food intake on memory consolidation during sleep or sleep deprivation.

Sleep enhances memory consolidation. Bearing in mind that food intake produces many metabolic signals that can influence memory processing in humans (e.g.

The EEG signal: a window on the cortical brain activity.

The accurate assessment of the depth of anesthesia, allowing a more accurate adaptation of the doses of hypnotics, is an important end point for the anesthesiologist. It is a particularly crucial issue in pediatric anesthesia, in the context of the recent controversies about the potential neurological consequences of the main anesthetic drugs on the developing brain. The electroencephalogram signal reflects the electrical activity of the neurons in the cerebral cortex.

Measuring the hypnotic depth of anaesthesia based on the EEG signal using combined wavelet transform, eigenvector and normalisation techniques.

This paper presents a new index to measure the hypnotic depth of anaesthesia (DoA) using EEG signals. This index is derived from applying combined Wavelet transform, eigenvector and normalisation techniques. The eigenvector method is first applied to build a feature function for six levels of coefficients in a discrete wavelet transform (DWT).

Perceptual echoes at 10 Hz in the human brain.

The occipital alpha rhythm (∼10 Hz) is the most prominent electrophysiological activity in the awake human brain, yet its functional role and relation to visual perception are little understood. Transient stimuli normally elicit a short series of positive and negative deflections lasting between 300 and 500 ms: the visual-evoked potential (VEP). Alpha oscillations, on the other hand, are generally suppressed by transient visual input; they only augment in response to periodic ("steady-state") inputs around 10 Hz.

Differential diagnoses of nocturnal fear and movement paroxysm: a case report.

Recurrent nocturnal behavioural and movement paroxysms are a diagnostic challenge for the clinical pediatrician. We report on an adolescent girl who presents recurrent stereotypical nightmare-like episodes occurring during non-REM sleep stages 1-2 (N1 and N2). We discuss the differential diagnoses between epileptic and nonepileptic events and between nocturnal frontal and temporal seizures.

Barking seizure: acute episodes of barking in a 75-year-old previously healthy man.

A 75-year-old right-handed man was admitted to our emergency department complaining of recurrent episodes of involuntary 'barking' within the past 12h. The episodes had occurred after an initial two-minute attack from sleep involving tonic contraction of the upper extremities and jaw locking. By the time of admission, the patient had had a total of at least 7-10 'barking' episodes, each lasting 30-45 s.

Efficient feature selection for sleep staging based on maximal overlap discrete wavelet transform and SVM.

In this paper, a novel algorithm is proposed with application in sleep/awake detection and in multiclass sleep stage classification (awake, non rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep and REM sleep). In turn, NREM is further divided into three stages denoted here by S1, S2, and S3. Six electroencephalographic (EEG) and two electro-oculographic (EOG) channels were used in this study.

A new classification for sleep analysis in critically ill patients.

Background: Patients in intensive care units (ICUs) experience severe sleep alterations and conventional sleep scoring rules are difficult to use in these patients. In a previous study, we showed that abnormal sleep EEG and wake EEG patterns could predict the outcome of noninvasive ventilation in a group of patients treated for acute respiratory failure. Our aims were to assess the prevalence of these abnormal sleep/wake EEG patterns in a larger group and search for objective parameters to help their identification.

Different quantitative EEG alterations induced by TBI among patients with different APOE genotypes.

Although several studies have revealed the EEG alterations in AD and TBI patients, the influence of APOE (apolipoprotein E) genotype in EEG at the early stage of TBI has not been reported yet. We have previously studied EEG alterations caused by TBI among different APOE genotype carriers. In this study, we firstly investigated the relationship between APOE polymorphisms and quantitative EEG (QEEG) changes after TBI.

Quantifying additive evoked contributions to the event-related potential.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) are widely used in basic neuroscience and in clinical diagnostic procedures. In contrast, neurophysiological insights from ERPs have been limited, as several different mechanisms lead to ERPs. Apart from stereotypically repeated responses (additive evoked responses), these mechanisms are asymmetric amplitude modulations and phase-resetting of ongoing oscillatory activity.

Effects of age and amyloid deposition on Aβ dynamics in the human central nervous system.

Background: The amyloid hypothesis predicts that increased production or decreased clearance of β-amyloid (Aβ) leads to amyloidosis, which ultimately culminates in Alzheimer disease (AD).

Objective: To investigate whether dynamic changes in Aβ levels in the human central nervous system may be altered by aging or by the pathology of AD and thus contribute to the risk of AD.

Design: Repeated-measures case-control study.

The extent of processing of near-hearing threshold stimuli during natural sleep.

Objectives: Event-related potential (ERPs) provide an exquisite means to monitor the extent of processing of external stimulus input during sleep. The processing of relatively high intensity stimuli has been well documented. Sleep normally occurs in much less noisy environments.

Neurofeedback for insomnia: a pilot study of Z-score SMR and individualized protocols.

Insomnia is an epidemic in the US. Neurofeedback (NFB) is a little used, psychophysiological treatment with demonstrated usefulness for treating insomnia. Our objective was to assess whether two distinct Z-Score NFB protocols, a modified sensorimotor (SMR) protocol and a sequential, quantitative EEG (sQEEG)-guided, individually designed (IND) protocol, would alleviate sleep and associated daytime dysfunctions of participants with insomnia.