Method of displaying and analyzing nonlinear, dynamic brain signals

摘要

The invention is a method to aid analysis of signals, such as electroencephalograms, pursuant to modern mathematical theories of nonlinear dynamical processes, sometimes referred to as chaotic dynamics or chaos theory. It employs graphic display and visual inspection of relatively less filtered, non-averaged raw test data, including raw data heretofore considered random or asynchronous 'noise'. The invention enables reversible decomposition of selected elements of graphic portraits of raw signal data to identify subsets of the depicted raw data which correspond to visually-identified, manually-selected patterns from within the graphic portrait. The identified subsets of raw data can be segregated even though a precise mathematical description of the visually identified pattern is unknown. The invention further comprises a variety of techniques for displaying four or more variables and for enhancing visual discrimination of patterns within computer generated graphic phase space portraits, and conceptions for overlaying symbols onto graphic points representing stimulus and response events concurring with particular signal samples in the phase space portrait. The invention also comprises subsets of pattern-generating signal data identified by the method of the invention and thus made available for further computer or other operations separately from the full data set.