Entropy and Complexity in Electrophysiology and Functional Imaging Signal Processing

Dear Colleagues,

The brain is a spatially-extended disordered system producing temporally complex fluctuations. Its extraordinary complexity renders many of its fundamental mechanisms and organizational principles elusive.

There are many reasons to use entropy-based measures to quantify system-level brain activity. On the one hand, entropy and, more generally, complexity quantifiers may represent the basis for convenient and efficient computational methods to characterize the large-scale datasets typical of neuroimaging recordings. On the other hand, the very essence of brain function is inextricably related to information (transfer, processing, and storing). Moreover, the brain is a dissipative out-of-equilibrium biophysical system. Therefore, in principle, it should be possible to describe its activity in terms of thermodynamic entropy production.

Finally, entropy-based, viz. maximum entropy, approaches can be used to account for the mechanisms of large-scale neural behavior emergence.

Over the past thirty years, each of these goals has been addressed in a great number of studies using standard non-invasive electrophysiological and neuroimaging techniques or modeling neural behavior at macroscopic scales, and a variety of entropy-based approaches. Nonetheless, some fundamental issues, ranging from local principles of collective brain activity to global aspects of emerging behavior are incompletely understood or are still difficult to handle and demand further elucidation.

This Special Issue welcomes original theoretical and experimental contributions proposing entropy-based methods (e.g., permutation entropy, Tsallis entropy) and, more generally, complexity constructs and addressing issues ranging from the mere quantification of observed neural activity to the modeling of fundamental brain principles. Of particular interest are contributions proposing multivariate and multiscale quantifiers, and topics such as the relation between dynamical complexity and spatial disorder or the role of higher-order correlations in large-scale brain activity. Opinion, perspective, and review articles on any of these topics are also welcome.

Dr. David Papo
Dr. Massimiliano Zanin
Guest Editors

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• EEG
• MEG
• fMRI
• entropy
• permutation entropy
• Tsallis entropy
• maximum entropy method
• entropy production
• complex networks
• topology-dynamics relationships