Nonlinear dynamics measures applied to EEG recordings of patients with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Quantifying the effects of a neurofeedback treatment

This work presents the application of nonlinear dynamics measures to electroencephalograms (EEG) acquired from patients with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) before and after a neurofeedback therapy, with the aim to assess the effects of the neurofeedback in a quantitative way. The database contains EEG registers of seven patients acquired in eyes-closed and eyes-opened conditions, in pre-and post-treatment phases. Five measures were applied: largest Lyapunov exponent, Lempel-Ziv complexity, Hurst exponent, and multiscale entropy on two different scales. The purpose is to test whether these measures are apt to detect and quantify differences from EEG registers between pre- and post-treatment. The results indicate that these measures could have a potential utility for detection of quantitative changes in specific EEG channels. In addition, the performance of some of these measures improved when the bandwidth was reduced to 3-30 Hz.