Extended detrended fluctuation analysis of sound-induced changes in brain electrical activity

Abstract We discuss the problem of revealing structural changes in rat electroencephalograms (EEG) caused by activation of the brain lymphatic drainage function due to a sound-induced stress. For this purpose, we apply the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) with its extended version to characterize long-range power-law correlations associated with the slow-wave dynamics of the electrical activity of the brain. The proposed extended DFA (EDFA) provided a stronger separation of groups of rats with different permeability of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) compared to the conventional DFA technique. We argue that such abilities of this tool can be useful in other diagnostic-related studies.