Thesis Project Form

Idiopathic REM sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) is considered a prodromal stage of alpha-synucleinopathies. Indeed, patients with iRBD have a 70% chance of developing parkinsonism/dementia within 10-15 years. Previous studies observed an abnormal glucose metabolism before the development of parkinsonism/dementia. Other studies reported changes in electroencephalography activity in iRBD patients with disease progression. A link between abnormal glucose metabolism and altered EEG activity could provide new insights into the pathophysiology of iRBD.

The main objective of the project is to investigate whether changes in electroencephalographic activity correlate with abnormal metabolic patterns. To this end, the project will involve several activities: (i) preprocessing of EEG signals; (ii) computation of EEG measures to evaluate brain synchronization and brain dynamics; (iii) source reconstruction analysis to observe electroencephalographic changes in specific brain networks; (iv) comparison of electroencephalographic activity with abnormal glucose metabolism.

1. Background literature analysis
2. EEG preprocessing
3. Development of the pipeline to perform a source reconstruction
4. Data analysis in Python/MatLab