Ansarinasab Sheida, Bayani Atiyeh, Parastesh Fatemeh, Ghassemi Farnaz, Rajagopal Karthikeyan, Jafari Sajad
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Tehran, Iran.
Center for Research, SRM Easwari Engineering College, Chennai, India.
Brain Struct Funct. 2025 Jun 4;230(5):82. doi: 10.1007/s00429-025-02935-3.
The synchronization phenomenon is one of the crucial collective behaviors of the brain network, with its abnormal patterns in the brain networks of individuals with mental disorders like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) capturing the interest of researchers. ADHD is a prevalent disorder among children, which is linked to adverse outcomes such as impaired recognition of others' emotional facial expressions, leading to awkward social interactions. Despite numerous studies focusing on the synchronization analysis of brain networks in ADHD children while observing emotional facial expressions, the path to synchronization in these networks has been overlooked. For this reason, this research aims to investigate the differences in the synchronization transition of brain networks between healthy and ADHD children while processing emotional facial expressions based on their electroencephalogram signals. The analysis of synchronization cluster sequences in children's brain networks reveals that the formation and progression of synchronization clusters toward complete synchronization follow a more organized and goal-directed pattern in the healthy group than in the ADHD group. Furthermore, examining synchronization clusters with significant differences in stability (P-values < 0.05) during the clustering sequence between the two groups highlights abnormal synchronization in the frontal brain region during the early stages of neural processing in the ADHD group. This finding may contribute to deficits in attentional control and emotional regulation observed in ADHD children. Moreover, the classification results indicate the high potential of synchronization transition-based features to distinguish between ADHD and healthy children, with maximum accuracy, precision, and sensitivity of 82%, 77%, and 90%, respectively.
同步现象是脑网络关键的集体行为之一，其在患有注意力缺陷多动障碍（ADHD）等精神障碍个体的脑网络中的异常模式引起了研究人员的兴趣。ADHD是儿童中一种常见的疾病，与诸如识别他人情绪面部表情受损等不良后果有关，进而导致尴尬的社交互动。尽管有许多研究聚焦于ADHD儿童在观察情绪面部表情时脑网络的同步分析，但这些网络中的同步路径却被忽视了。因此，本研究旨在基于脑电图信号，调查健康儿童和ADHD儿童在处理情绪面部表情时脑网络同步转换的差异。对儿童脑网络同步簇序列的分析表明，与ADHD组相比，健康组中同步簇向完全同步的形成和进展遵循更有组织、目标导向的模式。此外，检查两组在聚类序列期间稳定性有显著差异（P值<0.05）的同步簇，突出了ADHD组在神经处理早期额叶脑区的异常同步。这一发现可能有助于解释ADHD儿童中观察到的注意力控制和情绪调节缺陷。此外，分类结果表明基于同步转换的特征区分ADHD儿童和健康儿童具有很高的潜力，最大准确率、精确率和敏感度分别为82%、77%和90%。
