Estimation of the cortical connectivity by high-resolution EEG and structural equation modeling: Simulations and application to finger tapping data

Abstract—Today, the concept of brain connectivity plays a central role in the neuroscience. While functional connectivity is defined as the temporal coherence between the activities of different brain areas, the effective connectivity is defined as the simplest brain circuit that would produce the same temporal relationship as observed experimentally between cortical sites. The most used method to estimate effective connectivity in neuroscience is the structural equation modeling (SEM), typically used on data related to the brain hemodynamic behavior. However, the use of hemody-namic measures limits the temporal resolution on which the brain process can be followed. The present research proposes the use of the SEM approach on the cortical waveforms estimated from the hiigh-resolution EEG data, which exhibits a good spatial resolution and a higher temporal resolution than hemodynamic measures. We performed a simulation study, in which different main factors wer