METHOD FOR DETECTING AND LOCALIZING BRAIN SILENCES USING EEG

A novel method for using the widely-used electroencephalography (EEG) systems to detect and localize silences in the brain is disclosed. The method detects the absence of electrophysiological signals, or neural silences, using noninvasive scalp electroencephalography (EEG) signals. This method can also be used for reduced activity localization, activity level mapping throughout the brain, as well as mapping activity levels in different frequency bands. By accounting for the contributions of different sources to the power of the recorded signals, and using a hemispheric baseline approach and a convex spectral clustering framework, the method permits rapid detection and localization of regions of silence in the brain using a relatively small amount of EEG data.