Classifying Patients with pFC Lesions from Healthy Controls Using Directed Information Based Effective Brain Connectivity Measured from the Encoding Phase of Working Memory Task

This paper describes a group-level analysis of 14 subjects with prefrontal cortex (pFC) lesions and 20 healthy controls performing multiple lateralized visuospatial working memory (WM) trials. Using effective brain connectivity measures inferred from directed information (DI) during memory encoding, we first show that DI features can correctly classify 18 control subjects and 11 subjects with pFC lesions, providing an overall accuracy of 85.3%. Second, we show that differential DI, the change in DI during the encoding phase from pretrial, can successfully overcome inter-subject variability and correctly identify the class of all 34 subjects (100% accuracy). These accuracy results are based on two-thirds majority thresholding among all trials. Finally, we use Welch’s t-test to identify the crucial differences in the two classes’ sub-networks responsible for memory encoding. While the inflow of information to the prefrontal region is significant among subjects with pFC lesions, the outflow from the prefrontal to the frontal and central regions is diminished compared to the control subjects. We further identify specific neural pathways that are exclusively activated for each group during the encoding phase.