Dr. Michael Prerau
Assistant Professor of Medicine
Division of Sleep and Circadian Rhythms
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
 

Click here for free registration for Dr. Prerau's seminar

Sleep is a continuous, dynamic neural process involving the complex interaction of many different networks within the brain. Long-standing clinical practice, however, breaks up sleep into discrete sleep stages through time-consuming, subjective, visual inspection of 30-second segments of electroencephalogram (EEG) data. As a result, vital information about brain activity is lost. Spectral analysis is therefore a powerful tool for finding new insights into the physiological mechanisms underlying sleep and for developing new ways of diagnosing and tracking sleep and diagnosing related disorders.

In this seminar, Dr. Prerau will provide an overview of the basics of Fourier analysis, leading up to the understanding of multitaper spectral estimation. We will show how time-frequency analysis can be used to characterize EEG activity during sleep and show several applications of this approach to real experimental data.

Suggested Reading:
Prerau MJ, Bianchi MT, Brown RE, Ellenbogen JM, Patrick PL. Sleep Neurophysiological Dynamics Through the Lens of Multitaper Spectral Analysis. Physiology (Bethesda). 2017 Jan;32(1):60-92. Review. PubMed PMID: 27927806.

Tutorials:

Click here for tutorials on multitaper spectral estimation for sleep research