Search for: All records

Abstract Cortical ischaemic strokes result in cognitive deficits depending on the area of the affected brain. However, we have demonstrated that difficulties with attention and processing speed can occur even with small subcortical infarcts. Symptoms appear independent of lesion location, suggesting they arise from generalized disruption of cognitive networks. Longitudinal studies evaluating directional measures of functional connectivity in this population are lacking. We evaluated six patients with minor stroke exhibiting cognitive impairment 6–8 weeks post-infarct and four age-similar controls. Resting-state magnetoencephalography data were collected. Clinical and imaging evaluations of both groups were repeated 6- and 12 months later. Network Localized Granger Causality was used to determine differences in directional connectivity between groups and across visits, which were correlated with clinical performance. Directional connectivity patterns remained stable across visits for controls. After the stroke, inter-hemispheric connectivity between the frontoparietal cortex and the non-frontoparietal cortex significantly increased between visits 1 and 2, corresponding to uniform improvement in reaction times and cognitive scores. Initially, the majority of functional links originated from non-frontal areas contralateral to the lesion, connecting to ipsilesional brain regions. By visit 2, inter-hemispheric connections, directed from the ipsilesional to the contralesional cortex significantly increased. At visit 3, patients demonstrating continued favourable cognitive recovery showed less reliance on these inter-hemispheric connections. These changes were not observed in those without continued improvement. Our findings provide supporting evidence that the neural basis of early post-stroke cognitive dysfunction occurs at the network level, and continued recovery correlates with the evolution of inter-hemispheric connectivity. 

Moving averages are widely used to estimate time-varying parameters, especially when the underlying dynamic model is unknown or uncertain. However, the selection of the optimal window length over which to evaluate the moving averages remains an unresolved issue in the field. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of Allan variance to identify the characteristic timescales of a noisy random walk from historical measurements. Further, we provide a closed-form, analytical result to show that the Allan variance-informed averaging window length is indeed the optimal averaging window length in the context of moving average estimation of noisy random walks. We complement the analytical proof with numerical results that support the solution, which is also reflected in the authors’ related works. This systematic methodology for selecting the optimal averaging window length using Allan variance is expected to widely benefit practitioners in a diverse array of fields that utilize the moving average estimation technique for noisy random walk signals.