Brain activity comparison in patients with broca's aphasia before and after rehabilitation

Vanesa Močilnik (2022) Brain activity comparison in patients with broca's aphasia before and after rehabilitation. MSc thesis.

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Abstract

With the help of existing electroencephalography (EEG) data, we wished to compare brain activity in patients with Broca's aphasia before and after rehabilitation, and wanted to find out, whether the effect of therapy can be seen from the analysis of brain connectivity, frequency analysis and source localization. The data consists of patients’ EEG recordings while they were solving verbal and visuospatial working memory tasks. We started our research by first preprocessing the data, and continued by doing brain activity's source reconstruction, which is often called source localization. Moreover, we analysed the power spectrum of certain frequency bands – analysed the theta frequency band (4–7 Hz) and gamma frequency band (30–60 Hz). For brain connectivity measures we focused on the ones that calculate functional brain connectivity, so signals that are somehow statistically connected with each other. The goal of this research was to thoroughly analyse brain activity from the EEG data before and after rehabilitation, and see if we can conclude how effective the therapy was for patients with Broca's aphasia based on our results. Most of our calculations for brain connectivity and theta and gamma power showed a significant difference after rehabilitation – we noticed a difference for all combinations of the tasks and frequency bands after rehabilitation, p < 0.05. Based on our results, we conclude that we can infer the effect of rehabilitation from brain activity and connectivity analyses.

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