Influences of bilateral ischemic stroke on the cortical synchronization

Stroke has been one of the leading causes of mortality and long-term morbidity around the world. Describing the cortical synchrony has been useful in understanding of central nervous system disorders after brain injury. In this paper, we investigated the large scale cortical phase synchronization derived from multichannel electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings of bilateral ischemic stroke patients(n = 9). Compared with the results from the age- and gender-matched control subjects (n = 8), stroke patients showed 1) there were not significant changes of the intra-hemispheric synchronization after the bilateral stroke; and however, 2) both global and inter-hemispheric synchronization are vulnerable to the ischemic injury. Our preliminary results indicated that synchrony analysis of the spontaneous scalp EEG during at resting state provided new insight into cortical functional disorder following stroke.