Dear Colleagues,

In the last two decades, a major shift in the scientific discussions of neuroscience have involved a progressive focus on the concept of “brain networks” instead of the concept of “brain regions”. In fact, while the “brain regions” concept dominated the development of the neuroscience field from the 1950s to the beginning of the 1990s, the “brain networks” concept has only recently gained popularity and interest among researchers. This shift was aided by the large availability of data related to brain activity simultaneously sampled from multiple brain locations by magnetoencephalography (MEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or high-resolution EEG (hr-EEG).

An immediate consequence of the concept of “brain network” as a basic unit of behavior is the fact that different brain regions could actively participate in several concurrently active networks. Thus, the individuation of the particular “brain networks” from the gathered brain hemodynamic and/or neuroelectric/magnetic data has become an increasingly important area of study in neuroscience. Consequently, in neuroscience, the importance of methodologies aiming to study the statistical relations between multiple time series has increased.

The way in which the “task-related connections” between brain regions could be estimated based on the collected brain hemodynamic and/or neuroelectric data has been defined as “functional connectivity”. It is worth noting that “functional connectivity” is a data-driven estimation of the possible joint state of different brain regions.

Many functional connectivity methodologies have been derived in recent years to deal with the multivariate brain activity time series gathered from MEG, fMRI, and hr-EEG devices.

This Special Issue of Brain Science aims to present the state of the art in research on the estimation and/or application of functional connectivity techniques by research groups very active in this specific field of investigation.

The idea is to collect papers related to the methodologic estimation of cortical connectivity from multivariate time series of neurophysiologic signals (EEG, MEG, fNIRS, fMRI) as well as to the application of cortical connectivity estimates in different clinical and working environments in humans.

An example of the research areas on which we are soliciting papers is provided below:

• Brain–computer interfaces—functional connectivity developments and application to patients and normal subjects for neurorehabilitation, domotics, gaming, and entertainment;
• Functional connectivity analysis of neuroelectromagnetic activity in cognitive tasks;
• Estimation of EEG connectivity in pharmaco-EEG in humans;
• Methods for the connectivity analysis of EEG or MEG data from patients in relevant clinical contexts (e.g., data from cochlear-implanted patients or from deep brain stimulations);
• Methods for connectivity analysis of EEG or MEG data from normal subjects or patients in challenging contexts (driving car, airplanes, monitoring, video surveillance, etc.).

However, this is just a sample of possible contributions and is not an exhaustive list of topics. Please contact the Editors of this Special Issue with any pre-submission enquiries.

Dr. Giulia Cartocci
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Brain Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• EEG
• MEG
• fMRI
• fNIRS
• cognitive systems
• PDC
• DTF
• coherence