The central neural mechanism plays an important role in cardiopulmonary coupling. How the brain stem affects the cardiopulmonary coupling is relatively clear, but there are few studies on the cerebral cortex activity of cardiopulmonary coupling. We aim to study the response of the cerebral cortex for cardiopulmonary phase synchronization enhancement. The method of brain network was used and Pearson correlation analysis performed on the global attributes and phase synchronization time (CRPST) in the spontaneous, 2/2 and 4/4 breathing modes. Furthermore, calculated the phase lag index (PLI) among 21 lead EEG signals, and then analyzed the correlation between PLI and the parameters of cardiovascular and respiratory systems. Our results show that the global brain network characteristic parameters are significantly different in the three breath modes in the α (8-14Hz) band. The global efficiency and feature path length are significantly positively correlated with the phase synchronization and PLI indexes are widely related to CRPST and respiratory depth in the spontaneous breathing mode, while the brain network parameters and PLI indexes are not correlated with CRPST and PLI mainly positively correlated with respiratory rate in the controlled breathing modes. The differences of brain networks in the three modes are mainly caused by the physiological factors of cardiopulmonary coupling. These show that enhanced cardiopulmonary phase synchronization with controlled breathing based on heartbeat has a significant effect on the cardiopulmonary system and maybe provide some ideas for regulating cardiopulmonary function in the future.
Keywords: Brain network; Cardiopulmonary coupling; Cardiorespiratory Phase Synchronization; EEG; Phase lag index.
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