Insight Onto the Utility of Magnetoencephalography and Electroencephalography for Studying Brain Disorders

MagnetoEncephaloGraphy (MEG) and ElectroEncephaloGraphy (EEG) are the most common non-invasive brain imaging techniques for monitoring the electrical brain activity with millisecond resolution. Due to their high, millisecond, temporal resolution, these techniques are also the most suitable for studying the dynamic interplay of between brain regions during information processing. In clinical settings, MEG and EEG are valuable methods for the pre-surgical evaluation of patients with pharmaco-resistant epilepsy. The localization of epileptogenic zone (EZ) provided by these techniques can avoid or guide invasive intracranial recordings. More recently, there is has been a growing interest in exploiting leveraging these techniques as a crucial tool to advance our understanding of the pathophysiological mechanisms of major neuropsychiatric disorders and neurological diseases. This symposium offers an overview of very recent studies on the use ofwhich employed MEG and EEG as valid tools to investigate brain disorders. In particularSpecifically, the five talks will provide important insights on new methodological approaches to characterize brain dysfunctions in different pathological conditions. We will focus on : (1) emerging tool to characterize irritative zones in epileptic patients and to detect in a semi automatic way epileptiform abnormalities during EEG sleep recordings ina semi-automatic way; (2) two different methodological approaches to evaluate frequency specific alterations of brain activity and connectivity in schizoprenia and glioma patients; and (3) using machine-learning methods for identificationto identify EEG predictors of dementia in Parkinson.