Subjects with brain diseases are the major conditions of neurorehabilitation. It has brought new hopes to those with neurologic problems with the development of researches in the brain and other neurology. Strategies in the neurorehabilitation are now changing. It has progressed from focusing the improvement of the limbs of patients such as neurodevelopment approaches, functional electrical stimulation, robotic training, and so on, to the brain-orientated such as non-invasive brain stimulation, virtue reality, etc. A new model of neurorehabilitation is now being developed which integrates the methods stimulating the brain with those stimulating the limbs together either simultaneously or combination to modulate the effectiveness of different modalities. The final goals are to further enhance the outcome of rehabilitation.
Electroencephalogram (EEG) is characterized by high temporal resolution, and various EEG analysis methods have developed rapidly in recent years. The EEG microstate analysis method can be used to study the changes of the brain in the millisecond scale, and can also present the distribution of EEG signals in the topological level, thus reflecting the discontinuous and nonlinear characteristics of the whole brain. After more than 30 years of enrichment and improvement, EEG microstate analysis has penetrated into many research fields related to brain science. In this paper, the basic principles of EEG microstate analysis methods are summarized, and the changes of characteristic parameters of microstates, the relationship between microstates and brain functional networks as well as the main advances in the application of microstate feature extraction and classification in brain diseases and brain cognition are systematically described, hoping to provide some references for researchers in this field.