Mikhail Melnikov

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Leading researcher at Institute of Molecular Biology and Biophysics, Russian Academy of Sciences

Positive emotions determine individual well-being and sustainable social relationships. Here, we examined the neural processes mediating upregulation of positive social emotions using functional magnetic resonance imaging in healthy female volunteers. We identified brain regions engaged in upregulation of positive social emotions and applied a para...

Effective connectivity based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allows assessing directions of interaction between brain regions. For real-time fMRI, we compared models of positive social emotion regulation based on a network involving the bilateral amygdala, dorsomedial prefrontal, and subgenual anterior cingulate cortex. The top-down...

Highlights. Interactive brain stimulation is the next step in neurofeedback technology, it implies the possibility of volitional regulation of the hemodynamic response of specific brain region in order to transform entire brain network and obtain the desired clinical and behavioral dynamics in patients (subjects). One of the indications for using t...

Anhedonia and, particularly, social anhedonia is an important psychiatric symptom playing a crucial role in the development of depression and schizophrenia. Social anhedonia in healthy people is related to changes in structure, activation, and connectivity of different regions in the prefrontal, temporal, parieto-temporal, and basal areas. In patie...

The asymmetry of the frontal α rhythm of the EEG as an index of the comparative activity of the left and right prefrontal cortex is an important biomarker characterizing the state of a person’s emotional and motivational domains. This review outlines the methodological aspects of signal detection and correlation and briefly discusses systemic relat...

This article reviews neuroscience studies of frontal α asymmetry in healthy people. Right-sided α asymmetry is associated with sensitivity to reinforcement and social activity. Right- and left-hemisphere asymmetry in children corresponds to temperaments with predominance of arousal and inhibition respectively. Provocation of the anger leads to shif...

Frontal alpha asymmetry neurofeedback is used in affective disorders; however, little is known about the effects of this protocol on the composition of brain networks. In the current study, 13 healthy women underwent a course of self-regulation of the asymmetry of the EEG alpha or theta (control condition) band power. Before and after the course, r...

Interactive brain stimulation is a new generation of neurofeedback characterized by a radical change in the targets of cognitive (volitional, adaptive) influence. These targets are represented by specific cerebral structures and neural networks, the reconstruction of which leads to the brain functions' restoration and behavioral metamorphoses. Func...

Real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (rt-fMRI) neurofeedback was found to reduce depressive symptoms. However, no direct comparison of drug-free patients with an active psychotherapy control group is available. The present study compared rt-fMRI neurofeedback with cognitive behavioral therapy, as the standard treatment in patients declin...

Significance Research into neurobiology of depression primarily focuses on its complex psychological aspects. Here we propose an alternative approach and target sensorimotor alterations—a prominent but often neglected feature of depression. We demonstrated using resting-state functional MRI data and computational modeling that top-down and bottom-u...

The combination of modern machine learning and traditional statistical methods allows the construction of individual regression models for predicting the blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal of a selected region-of-interest within the brain using EEG signal. Among the many different models for motor cortex, we chose the EEG Fingerprint o...

This article discusses the contribution of fMRI- and fMRI-EEG-neurofeedback into recovery of motor function in two subacute stroke patients during the early post-stroke period. Premotor and supplementary motor zones of the cortex were chosen as the targets of voluntary control. Patient 1 received 6 sessions of motor imagery-based fMRI neurofeedback...

Aim. To investigate links between the attachment style and ability to detect facial emotions using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm in depressed patients.Materials and methods. Participants diagnosed with mild to moderate depression or dysthymia (19 patients) and healthy volunteers (20 individuals) were to identify one of eig...

Functional neuroimaging research on depression has traditionally targeted neural networks associated with the psychological aspects of depression. In this study, instead, we focus on alterations of sensorimotor function in depression. We used resting-state functional MRI data and Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM) to assess the hypothesis that depressio...

This article is aimed at showing the current level of evidence for the usage of biofeedback and neurofeedback to treat depression along with a detailed review of the studies in the field and a discussion of rationale for utilizing each protocol. La Vaque et al. criteria endorsed by the Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback and In...

Network mechanisms of depression development and especially of improvement from nonpharmacological treatment remain understudied. The current study is aimed at examining brain networks functional connectivity in depressed patients and its dynamics in nonpharmacological treatment. Resting state fMRI data of 21 healthy adults and 51 patients with mil...

Interaction of EEG and BOLD brain activity was studied in subjects during EEG-biofeedback training course (20 sessions). Healthy male subjects aged 20-35 underwent a training course of sound-reinforced upregulation of alpha- (20 participants) or beta-activity (9 participants). Pretraining, intermediate (after 10 sessions), and post-training fMRI-EE...

A course of interactive stimulation of primary motor cortex (Brodmann area 4) in the brain of a stroke patient resulted in recovery of locomotion volume in the paretic extremities and in improvement of general health accompanied with diverse changes in cerebral activity. During the training course, the magnitude of response in the visual fields of...

Synchronous fMRI-EEG mapping of cerebral activity in stroke patients made it possible to implement neurofeedback, a novel and promising therapeutic technology. This method integrates a real-time monitoring of cerebral activity by EEG and fMRI signals and training of the patients to control this activity simultaneously or alternatively via neurofeed...

In depressed patients, changes in spontaneous brain activity, in particular, the strength of functional connectivity between different regions are observed. The data on changes in the synchrony of different regions of interest in the brain can serve as markers of depressive symptoms and as the targets for the corresponding therapy. The study involv...

fMRI markers of mild depression were revealed using standard emotional test. Patients with mild depression and healthy volunteers were asked to determine gender of subjects in photographs with different emotional expressions (neutral, surprise, disgust, confusion, anger, sadness, fear, and joy). The pattern of response to different emotions was uni...

Depressive disorders can be associated with changes in not only interaction between neural networks, but also in their composition. Resting state fMRI scanning was performed for 4 min twice for each subject and the results of patients with mild depression (N=15) and healthy subjects (N=19) were analyzed. The fMRI signal was reduced into the indepen...

Depression is associated with changes in the pattern of interaction of cerebral networks, which can reflect both existing symptoms and compensatory processes. The study is based on analysis of resting state fMRI data from 15 patients with mild depression and 19 conventionally healthy individuals. From fMRI signal recorded at rest for 4 min, the ind...

Neural networks interaction was studied in healthy men (20-35 years old) who underwent 20 sessions of EEG biofeedback training outside the MRI scanner, with concurrent fMRI-EEG scans at the beginning, middle, and end of the course. The study recruited 35 subjects for EEG biofeedback, but only 18 of them were considered as "successful" in self-regul...

Neural networks interaction was studied in healthy men (20–35 years old) who underwent 20 sessions of EEG biofeedback training outside the MRI scanner, with concurrent fMRI–EEG scans at the beginning, middle, and end of the course. The study recruited 35 subjects for EEG biofeedback, but only 18 of them were considered as “successful” in self-regul...

Biocontrol based on fMRI signals from the motor area of the cortex is a potential approach to restoring motor functions in poststroke states and Parkinson’s disease. The region of interest in most studies is in the secondary motor areas and the strength of the magnetic field is 3 T. We report here our studies on biocontrol using the fMRI signal fro...

Objective. Estimation of the response time and accuracy of emotional stimuli during the fMRI task fulfillment in participants suffering from mild to moderate depressive disorder or from dysthymic disorder. Materials and methods. 21 subjects with mild to moderate depressive disorder or dysthymic disorder (D) participated, and 21 healthy volunteers (...

This review summarizes data on the therapeutic potential of biocontrol using fMRI signals recorded in real time (rt-fMRI), a novel technology allowing patients to learn voluntary control of activity in brain areas associated with impaired functions. Positive results have now been obtained using rt-fMRI biocontrol in poststroke states, Parkinson’s d...

Patients with mild depression and apparently healthy individuals were presented images and asked to sort them into “pleasant” and “unpleasant” subsets. In both groups, the main differences between brain activation patterns during presentation of pleasant and unpleasant images were localized in the motor regions (precentral and postcentral gyrus) an...

Some aspects of resting-state fMRI signal can be the key markers of depression. fMRI was recoded over 4 min in evidently healthy persons (N=21) and in patients with mild depression (N=21). The data were separated into the independent spatial components, and the strength of their association with established brain networks was analyzed. The patients...

Brain EEG-fMRI activity was studied in subjects, who had successfully completed the EEG alpha stimulating training course (20 sessions): for 14 healthy men (20-35 years) three records were obtained in the feedback loop (biofeedback with EEG alpha rhythm with sound reinforcement): in the beginning, middle and at the end of the course. During alpha t...

The review summarizes the data related to the potential of the real time fMRI biofeedback (the rt-fMRI), a novel technology implementing instructing patients to modify the neural activity in the certain brain regions related to the disordered function. The recent positive results were gained for a treatment of the post-stroke impairments, the Parki...

fMRI-EEG dynamics of brain activity in volunteers was studied during the course of EEG alpha-stimulation training (20 sessions). Twenty-three healthy men (20-35 years) were subjected to 3-fold mapping in a feedback loop (EEG alpha-rhythm biofeedback with acoustic reinforcement). This procedure was performed at the beginning, middle, and end of the...

Comparative identification of cerebral regions activated in men and women during perception of indefinite images was carried out by fMRT and psychological testing. Nine men and nine women aged 20–26 years took part in the study. The volunteers examined simple geometric figures, slightly structurized images (tables from Rorschach’s test), and images...

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we studied intracerebral dynamics during completion of Raven’s Progressive Matrices test. Solving the test organized in sets of progressively increasing difficulty cause changes in cerebellar activation functionally related to cognitive activities and operations. As the tasks became more complicated, we...

Subjects of the study were 100 chronic abdominal pain syndrome inpatients assigned to subgroups of different level of significance of psychological factors for the development of pain syndrome, different self-assessed pain level (utilizing visual analog scale), and different type of attitude towards disease (by the Bekhterev Institute Personality I...

Depth of activation reaction (α-activity suppression during the eyes-opening task) is considered to be an important quantitative characteristic of α-band brainwaves. Activation reaction was assessed from O1 and O2 leads in 31 male substance dependent subjects. In 7 cases it was measured twice: before and after α- or β-brainwave biofeedback training...

Paper reviews contemporary standards and results of neurovisualization studies of the human Self. It's been shown, that the medial prefrontal cortex plays the main role in supporting this mental function. The cingulate, the inferior parietal lobule and the precuneus has less influence on this process. Emotional aspects of the Self are also likely t...

Research into the cerebral patterns that govern the formation and development of addictive behavior is one of the most interesting goals of neurophysiology. Authors of contemporary papers on the matter define a number of symptoms that are all part of substance or non-substance dependence, each one of them leading to abnormalities in the correspondi...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging can be used to study numerous brain dysfunctions, including disorders of the self, in substance-dependent individuals. The self as the sum of human concepts about oneself is regulated by the brain system close to the default mode network: the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulated gyrus, and some pariet...

The aim of the work is an integration of contemporary electroencephalographic data on addictive disorders. A search in e-library, PubMed, EBSCO and Springer databases permitted us to define some of main directions (predisposition, effect of single intake, of dependence, abstinence, and role of comorbidities) and techniques (visual, spectral and coh...

Chronic tension headache is the most commonly experienced headache. Low effectiveness of its treatment is connected with lack of understanding of this disorder pathogenensis. It was shown that electromyographic-temperature training provoked modification of alpha-wave power and frequency: power of alpha increased, frequency of maximal increased as w...

This paper is dedicated to multifactor evaluation of heroin addicts identity and its modification during neurofeedback (alphastimulating training). It was found that alpha-stimulating training induced specific changes in identity concerned self-perception and future planning. Modification of real identity during neurofeedback courses was investigat...