Central and Central-Parietal EEG Signatures of Parkinson's Disease

This study investigates EEG as a potential early biomarker by applying deep learning techniques to resting-state EEG recordings from 31 subjects (15 with PD and 16 healthy controls). EEG signals were rigorously preprocessed to remove tremor artifacts, then converted to wavelet-based images by grouping spatially adjacent electrodes into triplets for convolutional neural network (CNN) classification. Our analysis across different brain regions and frequency bands showed distinct spatial-spectral patterns of PD-related neural oscillations. We identified high classification accuracy (74%) in the gamma band (40-62.4 Hz) for central-parietal electrodes (CP1, Pz, CP2), and 76% accuracy using central electrodes (C3, Cz, C4) with full-spectrum 0.4-62.4 Hz. In particular, we observed pronounced right-hemisphere involvement, specifically in parieto-occipital regions. Unlike previous studies that achieved higher accuracies by potentially including tremor artifacts, our approach isolates genuine neurophysiological alterations in cortical activity. These findings suggest that specific EEG-based oscillatory patterns, especially central-parietal gamma activity, may provide diagnostic information for PD, potentially before the onset of motor symptoms.