Analysis of microstate features for Parkinson's disease based on reliability validation

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a disorder with abnormal changes in brain activity. The lack of objective indicators makes the assessment of PD progression difficult. Assessment of brain activity changes in PD may offer a potential solution. Electroencephalogram (EEG) microstates reflect global dynamic changes in the brain. Therefore, we utilized microstates to assess changes in PD brain activity. However, the effect of epoch duration on the reliability of microstate analyses in PD is unclear. Thus, we first assessed the effect of data duration on the reliability of microstate topography and temporal features in PD and older healthy individuals. According to the reliability assessment, EEG epochs with high reliability were selected for microstate analysis in PD. Finally, we investigated the correlation between microstate features and clinical scales to determine whether these features could serve as objective indicators to evaluate PD progression. Microstate analysis features that show high reliability for 3 min and above epoch durations. The topology of microstate D was significantly changed in PD compared to healthy controls, as well as the temporal features of microstates C and D. Additionally, the occurrence of C was negatively correlated with MoCA, and the duration of D was positively correlated with UPDRS. High reliability of PD microstate features obtained by our approach. EEG for PD microstate analysis should be at least 3 min. Microstate analysis is expected to provide new ideas and objective indicators for assessing Parkinson's disease progression in the clinical setting.