Information-Based Classification of Electroencephalography (EEG) Signals for Healthy Adolescents and Adolescents with Symptoms of Schizophrenia

Abstract

Analysis of the brain activity is the major research area in human neuroscience. Besides many works that have been conducted on analysis of brain activity in case of healthy subjects, investigation of brain activity in case of patients with different brain disorders also has aroused the attention of many researchers. An interesting category of works belong to the comparison of brain activity between healthy subjects and patients with brain disorders. In this research, for the first time, we compare the brain activity between adolescents with symptoms of schizophrenia and healthy subjects, by information-based analysis of their Electroencephalography (EEG) signals. For this purpose, we benefit from the Shannon entropy as the indicator of information content. Based on the results of analysis, EEG signal in case of healthy subjects contains more information than EEG signal in case of subjects with schizophrenia. The result of statistical analysis showed the significant variation in the Shannon entropy of EEG signal between healthy adolescents and adolescents with symptoms of schizophrenia in case of P3, O1 and O2 channels. The employed method of analysis in this research can be further extended in order to investigate the variations in the information content of EEG signal in case of subjects with other brain disorders versus healthy subjects.