Analysis of Small Muscle Movement Effects on EEG Signals

In this thesis, the artefactual effects of the small muscle movements were investigated. Upper frequency bands (30 Hz) of the EEG signal were extracted in order to investigate the artefactual effects of the small muscle movements. When the contamination level is high, the detection of the small muscle artifact can be made with the 92.2% accuracy. If these artifacts are really small such as a single finger movement, the detection accuracy decreases to 64%. But, the detection accuracy increases to 72% after removing the eye blink artifacts. The results of the classification support our hypothesis about the artefactual effects of the small muscle movements

A hybrid brain-computer interface based on motor intention and visual working memory

Non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) based brain-computer interface (BCI) is able to provide alternative means for people with disabilities to communicate with and control over external assistive devices. A hybrid BCI is designed and developed for following two types of system (control and monitor). Our first goal is to create a signal decoding strategy that allows people with limited motor control to have more command over potential prosthetic devices. Eight healthy subjects were recruited to perform visual cues directed reaching tasks. Eye and motion artifacts were identified and removed to ensure that the subjects\u27 visual fixation to the target locations would have little or no impact on the final result. We applied a Fisher Linear Discriminate (FLD) analysis for single-trial classification of the EEG to decode the intended arm movement in the left, right, and forward directions (before the onsets of actual movements). The mean EEG signal amplitude near the PPC region 271-310 ms after visual stimulation was found to be the dominant feature for best classification results. A signal scaling factor developed was found to improve the classification accuracy from 60.11% to 93.91% in the two-class (left versus right) scenario. This result demonstrated great promises for BCI neuroprosthetics applications, as motor intention decoding can be served as a prelude to the classification of imagined motor movement to assist in motor disable rehabilitation, such as prosthetic limb or wheelchair control. The second goal is to develop the adaptive training for patients with low visual working memory (VWM) capacity to improve cognitive abilities and healthy individuals who seek to enhance their intellectual performance. VWM plays a critical role in preserving and processing information. It is associated with attention, perception and reasoning, and its capacity can be used as a predictor of cognitive abilities. Recent evidence has suggested that with training, one can enhance the VWM capacity and attention over time. Not only can these studies reveal the characteristics of VWM load and the influences of training, they may also provide effective rehabilitative means for patients with low VWM capacity. However, few studies have investigated VWM over a long period of time, beyond 5-weeks. In this study, a combined behavioral approach and EEG was used to investigate VWM load, gain, and transfer. The results reveal that VWM capacity is directly correlated to the reaction time and contralateral delay amplitude (CDA). The approximate magic number 4 was observed through the event-related potentials (ERPs) waveforms, where the average capacity is 2.8-item from 15 participants. In addition, the findings indicate that VWM capacity can be improved through adaptive training. Furthermore, after training exercises, participants from the training group are able to improve their performance accuracies dramatically compared to the control group. Adaptive training gains on non-trained tasks can also be observed at 12 weeks after training. Therefore, we conclude that all participants can benefit from training gains, and augmented VWM capacity can be sustained over a long period of time. Our results suggest that this form of training can significantly improve cognitive function and may be useful for enhancing the user performance on neuroprosthetics device

AUTOMATED ARTIFACT REMOVAL AND DETECTION OF MILD COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT FROM SINGLE CHANNEL ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHY SIGNALS FOR REAL-TIME IMPLEMENTATIONS ON WEARABLES

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a technique for recording asynchronous activation of neuronal firing inside the brain with non-invasive scalp electrodes. EEG signal is well studied to evaluate the cognitive state, detect brain diseases such as epilepsy, dementia, coma, autism spectral disorder (ASD), etc. In this dissertation, the EEG signal is studied for the early detection of the Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). MCI is the preliminary stage of Dementia that may ultimately lead to Alzheimers disease (AD) in the elderly people. Our goal is to develop a minimalistic MCI detection system that could be integrated to the wearable sensors. This contribution has three major aspects: 1) cleaning the EEG signal, 2) detecting MCI, and 3) predicting the severity of the MCI using the data obtained from a single-channel EEG electrode. Artifacts such as eye blink activities can corrupt the EEG signals. We investigate unsupervised and effective removal of ocular artifact (OA) from single-channel streaming raw EEG data. Wavelet transform (WT) decomposition technique was systematically evaluated for effectiveness of OA removal for a single-channel EEG system. Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Stationary Wavelet Transform (SWT), is studied with four WT basis functions: haar, coif3, sym3, and bior4.4. The performance of the artifact removal algorithm was evaluated by the correlation coefficients (CC), mutual information (MI), signal to artifact ratio (SAR), normalized mean square error (NMSE), and time-frequency analysis. It is demonstrated that WT can be an effective tool for unsupervised OA removal from single channel EEG data for real-time applications.For the MCI detection from the clean EEG data, we collected the scalp EEG data, while the subjects were stimulated with five auditory speech signals. We extracted 590 features from the Event-Related Potential (ERP) of the collected EEG signals, which included time and spectral domain characteristics of the response. The top 25 features, ranked by the random forest method, were used for classification models to identify subjects with MCI. Robustness of our model was tested using leave-one-out cross-validation while training the classifiers. Best results (leave-one-out cross-validation accuracy 87.9%, sensitivity 84.8%, specificity 95%, and F score 85%) were obtained using support vector machine (SVM) method with Radial Basis Kernel (RBF) (sigma = 10, cost = 102). Similar performances were also observed with logistic regression (LR), further validating the results. Our results suggest that single-channel EEG could provide a robust biomarker for early detection of MCI. We also developed a single channel Electro-encephalography (EEG) based MCI severity monitoring algorithm by generating the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) scores from the features extracted from EEG. We performed multi-trial and single-trail analysis for the algorithm development of the MCI severity monitoring. We studied Multivariate Regression (MR), Ensemble Regression (ER), Support Vector Regression (SVR), and Ridge Regression (RR) for multi-trial and deep neural regression for the single-trial analysis. In the case of multi-trial, the best result was obtained from the ER. In our single-trial analysis, we constructed the time-frequency image from each trial and feed it to the convolutional deep neural network (CNN). Performance of the regression models was evaluated by the RMSE and the residual analysis. We obtained the best accuracy with the deep neural regression method

Online Alpha Wave detector: an Embedded hardware-software implementation

The recent trend on embedded system development opens a new prospect for applications that in the past were not possible. The eye tracking for sleep and fatigue detection has become an important and useful application in industrial and automotive scenarios since fatigue is one of the most prevalent causes of earth-moving equipment accidents. Typical applications such as cameras, accelerometers and dermal analyzers are present on the market but have some inconvenient. This thesis project has used EEG signal, particularly, alpha waves, to overcome them by using an embedded software-hardware implementation to detect these signals in real tim

Optimised use of independent component analysis for EEG signal processing

Electroencephalography (EEG) is the prevalent technique for monitoring brain function. It employs a set of electrodes on the scalp to measure the electrical activity of the brain. EEG is mainly used by researchers to study the brain’s responses to a specific stimulus - the event-related potentials (ERPs). Different types of unwanted signals, which are known as artefacts, usually mix with the EEG at any point during the recording process. As the amplitudes of the EEG and ERPs are very small (in the order of microvolts), they can be buried in the artefacts which have very high amplitudes in the order of millivolts. Therefore, contamination of EEG activity by the artefacts can degrade the quality of the EEG recording and may cause error in EEG/ERP signal interpretation. Several EEG artefact removal methods already exist in the literature and these previous studies have concentrated on manual or automatic detection of either one or, of a few types of EEG artefacts. Among the proposed methods, Independent Component Analysis (ICA) based techniques are commonly applied to successfully detect the artefacts. Different types of ICA algorithms have been developed, which aim to estimate the individual sources of a linearly mixed signal. However, the estimation criterion differs across various ICA algorithms, which may deliver different results

Optimization of a hardware/software coprocessing platform for EEG eyeblink detection and removal

The feasibility of implementing a real-time system for removing eyeblink artifacts from electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings utilizing a hardware/software coprocessing platform was investigated. A software based wavelet and independent component analysis (ICA) eyeblink detection and removal process was extended to enable variation in its processing parameters. Exploiting the efficiency of hardware and the reconfigurability of software, it was ported to a field programmable gate array (FPGA) development platform which was found to be capable of implementing the revised algorithm, although not in real-time. The implemented hardware and software solution was applied to a collection of both simulated and clinically acquired EEG data with known artifact and waveform characteristics to assess its speed and accuracy. Configured for optimal accuracy in terms of minimal false positives and negatives as well as maintaining the integrity of the underlying EEG, especially when encountering EEG waveform patterns with an appearance similar to eyeblink artifacts, the system was capable of processing a 10 second EEG epoch in an average of 123 seconds. Configured for efficiency, but with diminished accuracy, the system required an average of 34 seconds. Varying the ICA contrast function showed that the gaussian nonlinearity provided the best combination of reliability and accuracy, albeit with a long execution time. The cubic nonlinearity was fast, but unreliable, while the hyperbolic tangent contrast function frequently diverged. It is believed that the utilization of programmable logic with increased logic capacity and processing speed may enable this approach to achieve the objective of real-time operation

Recent Applications in Graph Theory

Graph theory, being a rigorously investigated field of combinatorial mathematics, is adopted by a wide variety of disciplines addressing a plethora of real-world applications. Advances in graph algorithms and software implementations have made graph theory accessible to a larger community of interest. Ever-increasing interest in machine learning and model deployments for network data demands a coherent selection of topics rewarding a fresh, up-to-date summary of the theory and fruitful applications to probe further. This volume is a small yet unique contribution to graph theory applications and modeling with graphs. The subjects discussed include information hiding using graphs, dynamic graph-based systems to model and control cyber-physical systems, graph reconstruction, average distance neighborhood graphs, and pure and mixed-integer linear programming formulations to cluster networks

Brain-Computer Interface

Brain-computer interfacing (BCI) with the use of advanced artificial intelligence identification is a rapidly growing new technology that allows a silently commanding brain to manipulate devices ranging from smartphones to advanced articulated robotic arms when physical control is not possible. BCI can be viewed as a collaboration between the brain and a device via the direct passage of electrical signals from neurons to an external system. The book provides a comprehensive summary of conventional and novel methods for processing brain signals. The chapters cover a range of topics including noninvasive and invasive signal acquisition, signal processing methods, deep learning approaches, and implementation of BCI in experimental problems

A Brain-computer Interface Architecture Based On Motor Mental Tasks And Music Imagery

This present research proposes a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) architecture adapted to motor mental tasks and music imagery. For that purpose the statistical properties of the electroencephalographic signal (EEG) were studied, such as its probability distribution function, stationarity, correlation and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), in order to obtain a minimal empirical and well-founded parameter system for online classification. Stationarity tests were used to estimate the length of the time windows and a minimum length of 1.28 s was obtained. Four algorithms for artifact reduction were tested: threshold analysis, EEG filtering and two Independent Component Analysis (ICA) algorithms. This analysis concluded that the algorithm fastICA is suitable for online artifact removal. The feature extraction used the Power Spectral Density (PSD) and three methods were tested for automatic selection of features in order to have a training step independent of the mental task paradigm, with the best performance obtained with the Kullback-Leibler symmetric divergence method. For the classification, the Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) was used and a step of reclassification is suggested. A study of four motor mental tasks and a non-motor related mental task is performed by comparing their periodograms, Event-Related desynchronization/synchronization (ERD/ERS) and SNR. The mental tasks are the imagination of either movement of right and left hands, both feet, rotation of a cube and sound imagery. The EEG SNR was estimated by a comparison with the correlation between the ongoing average and the final ERD/ERS curve, in which we concluded that the mental task of sound imagery would need approximately five times more epochs than the motor-related mental tasks. The ERD/ERS could be measured even for frequencies near 100 Hz, but in absolute amplitudes, the energy variation at 100 Hz was one thousand times smaller than for 10 Hz, which implies that there is a small probability of online detection for BCI applications in high frequency. Thus, most of the usable information for online processing and BCIs corresponds to the α/µ band (low frequency). Finally, the ERD/ERS scalp maps show that the main difference between the sound imagery task and the motor-related mentaltasks is the absence of ERD at the µ band, in the central electrodes, and the presence of ERD at the αband in the temporal and lateral-frontal electrodes, which correspond tothe auditory cortex, the Wernickes area and the Brocas area