Comparative Analysis of NIRS-EEG Motor Imagery Data Using Features from Spatial, Spectral and Temporal Domain

Effective common spatial pattern (CSP) feature extraction for motor-imagery (MI) EEG recordings usually depends on the filter band selection to a large extent. However, the most proper filter band can hardly be determined manually due to its subject-specific property. This study introduces a sparse support vector machine (SSVM) approach to implement simultaneous CSP feature selection and classification for MI-based brain–computer interface (BCI). In SSVM, CSP features are first extracted on multiple signals that are filtered from raw EEG data at a set of overlapping subbands. SVM with l 1-norm regularization is then proposed to classify MI tasks with automatic selection of filter bands giving the significant CSP features. The effectiveness of SSVM for MI classification is demonstrated on the BCI Competition III dataset IVa, in comparison with several other competing methods. Experimental results indicate that the proposed SSVM method is promising for development of an improved MI-based BCI.

Brain-computer interface (BCI) systems are proposed as a means of communication for locked-in patients. One common BCI paradigm is motor imagery in which the user controls a BCI by imagining movements of different body parts. It is known that imagining different body parts results in event-related desynchronization (ERD) in various frequency bands. Existing methods such as common spatial patterns (CSP) and its refinement filterbank common spatial patterns (FB-CSP) aim at finding features that are informative for classification of the motor imagery class. Our proposed method is a temporally adaptive common spatial patterns implementation of the commonly used filter-bank common spatial patterns method using convolutional neural networks; hence it is called TA-CSPNN. With this method we aim to: (1) make the feature extraction and classification end-to-end, (2) base it on the way CSP/FBCSP extracts relevant features, and finally, (3) reduce the number of trainable parameters compared to existing deep learning methods to improve generalizability in noisy data such as EEG. More importantly, we show that this reduction in parameters does not affect performance and in fact the trained network generalizes better for data from some participants. We show our results on two datasets, one publicly available from BCI Competition IV, dataset 2a and another in-house motor imagery dataset.

Our findings indicate the potential use of the proposed data fusion framework utilizing the graph-based features in the hybrid BCI systems by making the motor imaginary inference more accurate and more robust.

Motor imagery (MI) is the most used paradigm in Brain-Computer Interface (BCI). As in other BCI paradigms, it is divided into feature extraction and classification. In this study, we implemented two feature extraction methods, one based on the well-known Common Spatial Pattern (CSP) algorithm and the other based on a not so well-known electroencephalogram (EEG) source localization technique called Low-Resolution Brain Electromagnetic Tomography (LORETA). We evaluated 30 right-handed subjects from an EEG data set made publicly available through Giga Science, where participants performed MI of left- and right-hand movements. After feature extraction with CSP and LORETA, MI tasks classification were carried out using the Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Naïve Bayes (NB) and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) algorithms. Finally, we evaluated classification performance with all possible combination of classifiers and feature extraction methods. For all classifiers, the CSP feature extraction method performed better than LORETA. The best classification accuracy for the LORETA method was 71.2% and for the CSP method was 94.2%, both achieved with SVM.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) were initially created to help individuals with disabilities control devices and communicate without muscle movement. Today, BCIs are used for prosthetic control, cognitive enhancement, and neurological rehabilitation. The BCI system depends on analyzing electroencephalogram (EEG) signals captured from the brain. Decoding these EEG signals is a complex process that combines multiple algorithms to extract meaningful information from these intricate and noisy signals. One of the most popular techniques is the Common Spatial Patterns (CSP), which helps preserve useful and sensitive information. This paper presents an optimized extension of the CSP model for extracting EEG data features in a multiclass setting using Riemannian geometry-based weighting. The use of weighting based on Riemannian geometry enhances the robustness of covariance matrix computation, thereby decreasing the influence of noise that can significantly distort the mean of covariance matrices in the traditional CSP method. The proposed approach is also extended by the integration of a multi-band filter bank, providing a more detailed examination of EEG signals. Three classifiers, Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Random Forest Classifier (RFC), and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), are employed to differentiate features across four motor imagery tasks. LDA achieves an accuracy of 80.40%, while MLP and RFC reach 80.02% and 80.90%, respectively. The results obtained using a majority vote combining the decisions of the three classifiers are 81.83% for accuracy and Recall, 82.74% for precision, and 81.87% for F1-score. The proposed architecture is evaluated using the BCI Competition IV set 2a dataset, proving its effectiveness in EEG signal classification for BCI applications.

Brain computer interface (BCI) is known as a good way to communicate between brain and computer or other device. There are many kinds of physiological signal can operate BCI systems. Motor imagery (MI) has been demonstrated to be a good way to operate a BCI system. In some recent studies about MI based BCI systems, low accuracy rate and time consuming are common problems. In this thesis, a novel motor imagery algorithm is proposed to improve the accuracy rate and computational efficiency at the same time. The architecture of many BCI system is quite complex and they involve time consuming processing. The electroencephalography (EEG) signal is the most commonly used inputs for BCI applications but EEG is often contaminated with noise. To overcome such drawbacks, in this paper we use the common spatial pattern (CSP) for feature extraction from EEG and the linear discriminant analysis (LDA) for motor imagery classification. In this study, CSP and LDA have been used to reduce the artifact and classify Mi-based EEG signal. We have used two-level cross validation scheme to determine the subject specific best time window and number of CSP features. We have compared the performance of our system with BCI competition results. This novel algorithm with high accuracy rate and efficiency can be applied to real time BCI system in real-life applications.

Motor imagery (MI) is a cognitive process wherein an individual mentally rehearses a specific movement without physically executing it. Recently, MI-based brain-computer interface (BCI) has attracted widespread attention. However, accurate decoding of MI and understanding of neural mechanisms still face huge challenges. These seriously hinder the clinical application and development of BCI systems based on MI. Thus, it is very necessary to develop new methods to decode MI tasks. In this work, we propose a multi-branch convolutional neural network (MBCNN) with a temporal convolutional network (TCN), an end-to-end deep learning framework to decode multi-class MI tasks. We first used MBCNN to capture the MI electroencephalography signals information on temporal and spectral domains through different convolutional kernels. Then, we introduce TCN to extract more discriminative features. The within-subject cross-session strategy is used to validate the classification performance on the dataset of BCI Competition IV-2a. The results showed that we achieved 75.08% average accuracy for 4-class MI task classification, outperforming several state-of-the-art approaches. The proposed MBCNN-TCN-Net framework successfully captures discriminative features and decodes MI tasks effectively, improving the performance of MI-BCIs. Our findings could provide significant potential for improving the clinical application and development of MI-based BCI systems.

Recognition of motor imagery tasks for BCI using CSP and chaotic PSO twin SVM

Current Brain Computer Interface (BCI) systems are still not commercialized due to their insufficient accuracies. Although Common Spatial Pattern (CSP) is an effective method for BCI applications, it does not consider the channels' co-activation information. This study is aimed at modifying CSP method by incorporating synchronization of channels in the CSP formula and then passes the values through a nonlinear kernel function to enhance the discrimination rate between the left and right imagery movements. Inserting the synchronization of every two channels into the kernel CSP formula is performed in two different ways. Experimental results on a set of EEG signals belonged to three subjects for discrimination of left and right hand imagery movements reveal that the proposed kernel synchronous CSP method outperformed the standard CSP, synchronous CSP and kernel CSP methods for all subjects.

An efficient feature extraction method for two classes of electroencephalography (EEG) is demonstrated using Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) with optimal spatial filters. However, the effects of artifacts and non-stationary uncertainty are more pronounced when CSP filtering is used. Furthermore, traditional CSP methods lack frequency domain information and require many input channels. Therefore, to overcome this shortcoming, a feature extraction method based on Online Recursive Independent Component Analysis (ORICA)-CSP is proposed. For EEG-based brain—computer interfaces (BCIs), especially online and real-time BCIs, the most widely used classifiers used to be linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and support vector machines (SVM). Previous evaluations clearly show that SVMs generally outperform other classifiers in terms of performance. In this case, Adaptive Support Vector Machine (A-SVM) is used for classification together with the ORICA-CSP method. The results are promising, and the experiments are performed on EEG data of 4 classes’ motor images, namely Dataset 2a of BCI Competition IV.

BackgroundOne of the most promising applications for electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain computer interface is for stroke rehabilitation. Implemented as a standalone motor imagery (MI) training system or as part of a rehabilitation robotic system, many studies have shown benefits of using them to restore motor control in stroke patients. Hand movements have widely been chosen as MI tasks. Although potentially more challenging to analyze, wrist and forearm movement such as wrist flexion/extension and forearm pronation/supination should also be considered for MI tasks, because these movements are part of the main exercises given to patients in conventional stroke rehabilitation. This paper will evaluate the effectiveness of such movements for MI tasks.MethodsThree hand and wrist movement tasks which were hand opening/closing, wrist flexion/extension and forearm pronation/supination were chosen as motor imagery tasks for both hands. Eleven subjects participated in the experiment. All of them completed hand opening/closing task session. Ten subjects completed two MI task sessions which were hand opening/closing and wrist flexion/extension. Five subjects completed all three MI tasks sessions. Each MI task comprised 8 sessions spanning a 4 weeks period. For classification, feature extraction based on common spatial pattern (CSP) algorithm was used. Two types were implemented, one with conventional CSP (termed WB) and one with an increase number of features achieved by filtering EEG data into five bands (termed FB). Classification was done by linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and support vector machine (SVM).ResultsEight-fold cross validation was applied on EEG data. LDA and SVM gave comparable classification accuracy. FB achieved significantly higher classification accuracy compared to WB. The accuracy of classifying wrist flexion/extension task were higher than that of classifying hand opening/closing task in all subjects. Classifying forearm pronation/supination task achieved higher accuracy than classifying hand opening/closing task in most subjects but achieved lower accuracy than classifying wrist flexion/extension task in all subjects. Significant improvements of classification accuracy were found in nine subjects when considering individual sessions of experiments of all MI tasks. The results of classifying hand opening/closing task and wrist flexion/extension task were comparable to the results of classifying hand opening/closing task and forearm pronation/supination task. Classification accuracy of wrist flexion/extension task and forearm pronation/supination task was lower than those of hand movement tasks and wrist movement tasks.ConclusionHigh classification accuracy of the three MI tasks support the possibility of using EEG-based stroke rehabilitation system with these movements. Either LDA or SVM can equally be chosen as a classifier since the difference of their accuracies is not statistically significant. Significantly higher classification accuracy made FB more suitable for classifying MI task compared to WB. More training sessions could potentially lead to better accuracy as evident in most subjects in this experiment.

The demand for public datasets has increased as data-driven methodologies have been introduced in the field of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Indeed, many BCI datasets are available in various platforms or repositories on the web, and the studies that have employed these datasets appear to be increasing. Motor imagery is one of the significant control paradigms in the BCI field, and many datasets related to motor tasks are open to the public already. However, to the best of our knowledge, these studies have yet to investigate and evaluate the datasets, although data quality is essential for reliable results and the design of subject− or system-independent BCIs. In this study, we conducted a thorough investigation of motor imagery/execution EEG datasets recorded from healthy participants published over the past 13 years. The 25 datasets were collected from six repositories and subjected to a meta-analysis. In particular, we reviewed the specifications of the recording settings and experimental design, and evaluated the data quality measured by classification accuracy from standard algorithms such as Common Spatial Pattern (CSP) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) for comparison and compatibility across the datasets. As a result, we found that various stimulation types, such as text, figure, or arrow, were used to instruct subjects what to imagine and the length of each trial also differed, ranging from 2.5 to 29 s with a mean of 9.8 s. Typically, each trial consisted of multiple sections: pre-rest (2.38 s), imagination ready (1.64 s), imagination (4.26 s, ranging from 1 to 10 s), the post-rest (3.38 s). In a meta-analysis of the total of 861 sessions from all datasets, the mean classification accuracy of the two-class (left-hand vs. right-hand motor imagery) problem was 66.53%, and the population of the BCI poor performers, those who are unable to reach proficiency in using a BCI system, was 36.27% according to the estimated accuracy distribution. Further, we analyzed the CSP features and found that each dataset forms a cluster, and some datasets overlap in the feature space, indicating a greater similarity among them. Finally, we checked the minimal essential information (continuous signals, event type/latency, and channel information) that should be included in the datasets for convenient use, and found that only 71% of the datasets met those criteria. Our attempts to evaluate and compare the public datasets are timely, and these results will contribute to understanding the dataset’s quality and recording settings as well as the use of using public datasets for future work on BCIs.

Motor imagery electroencephalography (EEG) has been successfully used in the brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. Broad learning (BL) is an effective and efficient incremental learning algorithm with simple neural network structure. In this work, a novel EEG multi-classification method is proposed by combining with BL and common spatial pattern (CSP). Firstly, the CSP algorithm with the one-versus-the-test scheme is exploited to extract the discriminative multiclass brain patterns from raw EEG data, and then the BL algorithm is applied to the extracted features to discriminate the classes of EEG signals during different motor imagery tasks. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method has been verified on four-class motor imagery EEG data from BCI Competition IV Dataset 2a. Compare with other methods including ELM, HELM, DBN and SAE, the proposed method has yielded higher average classification test accuracy with less training time-consuming. The proposed method is meaningful and may have potential to apply into BCI field.

In recent years, Brain Computer Interface (BCI) based on motor imagery has been widely used in the fields of medicine, active safe systems for automobiles, entertainment, and so on. Motor imagery relevant electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are weak, nonlinear, and susceptible to interference. As a feature extraction method for motor imagery, Common Spatial Pattern (CSP) has been proven to be very effective. However, its effectiveness depends heavily on the choice of frequency bands, and Euclidean space cannot effectively describe the inner relationship. To solve these problems, a classification approach for motor imagery using the Geodesic Filtering Common Spatial Pattern (GFCSP) and filter-bank Feature Weighted Support Vector Machine (FWSVM) is presented. First, GFCSP based on the Riemannian manifold is proposed, in which the extracted covariance features are spatially filtered in Riemannian tangent space, and the average covariance matrix is replaced by Riemannian mean in CSP. Second, filter-bank FWSVM with a feature weighted matrix is proposed. EEG signals are filtered into 8-12 Hz, 12-16 Hz, 18-22 Hz, 22-26 Hz, and a wide band of 8-24 Hz, and GFCSP features of these filtered signals are extracted. A feature weighted matrix is calculated using mutual information and the Pearson correlation coefficient from these features and class information. Then, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used for classification with the feature weighted matrix. Finally, the proposed method is validated on the dataset IVa in BCI competition III. Classification accuracies of the five subjects are 92.31%, 99.03%, 80.36%, 96.30%, and 97.67%, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Asynchronous Brain Computer Interface (BCI) is an important class of BCI systems that has not received enough attention from the BCI community. In this work we introduce for the first time a system for classification of four different motor imageries in the context of an asynchronous BCI system which distinguishes between periods of movement imagination occurrence and idling or resting periods of ongoing EEG signal as well as classifying the 4 class motor imageries. We used two multi class extensions of the method of Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) for feature extraction and LDA, SVM, and MDA well known classifiers for combination purposes. We have applied our procedure to data set IIIa from BCI Competition III [2]. Offline evaluation of a prototype system demonstrated true positive rates in the range of 56%-88% with corresponding false positive rates in the range of 18%-9%.