Foreword (by Fernando Lopes L. Da Silva)
Piotr Durka has written an unusual book on the analysis of the
electroencephalogram (EEG) that goes beyond the mathematical fundaments
and the subtleties of signal analysis. He proposes an original
``unifying theory'' that may account for how different
aspects of EEG signals may be analyzed within a common theoretical
framework.
This is an ambitious objective. He shows in this book how this
objective may be achieved in clear language, for specialists in signal
analysis and clinical neurophysiologists alike.
The studies on which this book is based stem from the research line
pursued in the course of the last decades by the Warsaw group led by
Katarzyna Blinowska. This book represents a comprehensive
account of the theoretical and mathematical basis of adaptive
time-frequency EEG signal analysis, as well as of the
methodology of how the corresponding algorithms can be implemented in
everyday practice.
This book represents a novel link between the visually guided
feature extraction approach made by the electroencephalographer in
everyday practice, and the advanced computer analysis based
on ``matching pursuit'' and related algorithms. In
this way, this book provides a remarkable synthesis between theory and
practice.
This important contribution to the literature should be an
incentive to advance the field of electroencephalography,
both for theoreticians and clinical neurophysiologists.
Fernando Lopes da Silva,
M.D., Ph.D.
University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
March 2007