Fig. 2. Fingerprints of criticality loss and associated recovery in a representative patient.
Analysis of neural activity patterns, S1 and S2, of a healthy participant (Con. / a, b) and stroke patient (Pat. / c, d). In blue dashed line we show the corresponding control's group average, while the shaded area corresponds to one standard deviation. For the healthy participant, t1 and t2 correspond at two different time points 3 months apart. For the patient, t1 and t2 correspond to 3 months and 12 months post-stroke. The healthy participant exhibits features of criticality at both time points with small variability across time points and within the variability of the healthy group. At the same threshold T, both S1 and S2 sharply change their size. For the stroke patient under consideration, the flattened shape at t1 of both, S1 and S2, combined with the monotonic behavior of S2 indicates lack of criticality, which, however, returns at t2 as depicted by the emergence of a peak in S2. The black vertical dashed line depicts the critical point of healthy controls. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.