The evolution of AI approaches for motor imagery EEG-based BCIs

The Motor Imagery (MI) electroencephalography (EEG) based Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) allow the direct communication between humans and machines by exploiting the neural pathways connected to motor imagination. Therefore, these systems open the possibility of developing applications that could span from the medical field to the entertainment industry. In this context, Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches become of fundamental importance especially when wanting to provide a correct and coherent feedback to BCI users. Moreover, publicly available datasets in the field of MI EEG-based BCIs have been widely exploited to test new techniques from the AI domain. In this work, AI approaches applied to datasets collected in different years and with different devices but with coherent experimental paradigms are investigated with the aim of providing a concise yet sufficiently comprehensive survey on the evolution and influence of AI techniques on MI EEG-based BCI data.Comment: Submitted to Italian Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Human Machine Interaction (AIxHMI 2022), December 02, 2022, Udine, Ital

Improved Motor Imagery Classification Using Adaptive Spatial Filters Based on Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm

As a typical self-paced brain-computer interface (BCI) system, the motor imagery (MI) BCI has been widely applied in fields such as robot control, stroke rehabilitation, and assistance for patients with stroke or spinal cord injury. Many studies have focused on the traditional spatial filters obtained through the common spatial pattern (CSP) method. However, the CSP method can only obtain fixed spatial filters for specific input signals. Besides, CSP method only focuses on the variance difference of two types of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, so the decoding ability of EEG signals is limited. To obtain more effective spatial filters for better extraction of spatial features that can improve classification to MI-EEG, this paper proposes an adaptive spatial filter solving method based on particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO). A training and testing framework based on filter bank and spatial filters (FBCSP-ASP) is designed for MI EEG signal classification. Comparative experiments are conducted on two public datasets (2a and 2b) from BCI competition IV, which show the outstanding average recognition accuracy of FBCSP-ASP. The proposed method has achieved significant performance improvement on MI-BCI. The classification accuracy of the proposed method has reached 74.61% and 81.19% on datasets 2a and 2b, respectively. Compared with the baseline algorithm (FBCSP), the proposed algorithm improves 11.44% and 7.11% on two datasets respectively. Furthermore, the analysis based on mutual information, t-SNE and Shapley values further proves that ASP features have excellent decoding ability for MI-EEG signals, and explains the improvement of classification performance by the introduction of ASP features.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figure

TOWARDS PREDICTION AND IMPROVEMENT OF EEG-BASED MI-BCI PERFORMANCE.

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

An Approach of One-vs-Rest Filter Bank Common Spatial Pattern and Spiking Neural Networks for Multiple Motor Imagery Decoding

Motor imagery (MI) is a typical BCI paradigm and has been widely applied into many aspects (e.g. brain-driven wheelchair and motor function rehabilitation training). Although significant achievements have been achieved, multiple motor imagery decoding is still unsatisfactory. To deal with this challenging issue, firstly, a segment of electroencephalogram was extracted and preprocessed. Secondly, we applied a filter bank common spatial pattern (FBCSP) with one-vs-rest (OVR) strategy to extract the spatio-temporal-frequency features of multiple MI. Thirdly, the F-score was employed to optimise and select these features. Finally, the optimized features were fed to the spiking neural networks (SNN) for classification. Evaluation was conducted on two public multiple MI datasets (Dataset IIIa of the BCI competition III and Dataset IIa of the BCI competition IV). Experimental results showed that the average accuracy of the proposed framework reached up to 90.09% (kappa: 0.868) and 81.33% (kappa: 0.751) on the two public datasets, respectively. The achieved performance (accuracy and kappa) was comparable to the best one of the compared methods. This study demonstrated that the proposed method can be used as an alternative approach for multiple MI decoding and it provided a potential solution for online multiple MI detection

Facilitating motor imagery-based brain–computer interface for stroke patients using passive movement

Motor imagery-based brain–computer interface (MI-BCI) has been proposed as a rehabilitation tool to facilitate motor recovery in stroke. However, the calibration of a BCI system is a time-consuming and fatiguing process for stroke patients, which leaves reduced time for actual therapeutic interaction. Studies have shown that passive movement (PM) (i.e., the execution of a movement by an external agency without any voluntary motions) and motor imagery (MI) (i.e., the mental rehearsal of a movement without any activation of the muscles) induce similar EEG patterns over the motor cortex. Since performing PM is less fatiguing for the patients, this paper investigates the effectiveness of calibrating MI-BCIs from PM for stroke subjects in terms of classification accuracy. For this purpose, a new adaptive algorithm called filter bank data space adaptation (FB-DSA) is proposed. The FB-DSA algorithm linearly transforms the band-pass-filtered MI data such that the distribution difference between the MI and PM data is minimized. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by an offline study on data collected from 16 healthy subjects and 6 stroke patients. The results show that the proposed FB-DSA algorithm significantly improved the classification accuracies of the PM and MI calibrated models (p < 0.05). According to the obtained classification accuracies, the PM calibrated models that were adapted using the proposed FB-DSA algorithm outperformed the MI calibrated models by an average of 2.3 and 4.5 % for the healthy and stroke subjects respectively. In addition, our results suggest that the disparity between MI and PM could be stronger in the stroke patients compared to the healthy subjects, and there would be thus an increased need to use the proposed FB-DSA algorithm in BCI-based stroke rehabilitation calibrated from PM

Feature Extraction Method Based on Filter Banks and Riemannian Tangent Space in Motor-Imagery BCI.

Optimal feature extraction for multi-category motor imagery brain-computer interfaces (MI-BCIs) is a research hotspot. The common spatial pattern (CSP) algorithm is one of the most widely used methods in MI-BCIs. However, its performance is adversely affected by variance in the operational frequency band and noise interference. Furthermore, the performance of CSP is not satisfactory when addressing multi-category classification problems. In this work, we propose a fusion method combining Filter Banks and Riemannian Tangent Space (FBRTS) in multiple time windows. FBRTS uses multiple filter banks to overcome the problem of variance in the operational frequency band. It also applies the Riemannian method to the covariance matrix extracted by the spatial filter to obtain more robust features in order to overcome the problem of noise interference. In addition, we use a One-Versus-Rest support vector machine (OVR-SVM) model to classify multi-category features. We evaluate our FBRTS method using BCI competition IV dataset 2a and 2b. The experimental results show that the average classification accuracy of our FBRTS method is 77.7% and 86.9% in datasets 2a and 2b respectively. By analyzing the influence of the different numbers of filter banks and time windows on the performance of our FBRTS method, we can identify the optimal number of filter banks and time windows. Additionally, our FBRTS method can obtain more distinctive features than the filter banks common spatial pattern (FBCSP) method in two-dimensional embedding space. These results show that our proposed method can improve the performance of MI-BCIs

Методы классификации ЭЭГ-паттернов воображаемых движений

The review focuses on the most promising methods for classifying EEG signals for non-invasive BCIs and theoretical approaches for the successful classification of EEG patterns. The paper provides an overview of articles using Riemannian geometry, deep learning methods and various options for preprocessing and "clustering" EEG signals, for example, common-spatial pattern (CSP). Among other approaches, pre-processing of EEG signals using CSP is often used, both offline and online. The combination of CSP, linear discriminant analysis, support vector machine and neural network (BPNN) made it possible to achieve 91% accuracy for binary classification with exoskeleton control as a feedback. There is very little work on the use of Riemannian geometry online and the best accuracy achieved so far for a binary classification problem is 69.3% in the work. At the same time, in offline testing, the average percentage of correct classification in the considered articles for approaches with CSP – 77.5 ± 5.8%, deep learning networks – 81.7 ± 4.7%, Riemannian geometry – 90.2 ± 6.6%. Due to nonlinear transformations, Riemannian geometry-based approaches and complex deep neural networks provide higher accuracy and better extract of useful information from raw EEG recordings rather than linear CSP transformation. However, in real-time setup, not only accuracy is important, but also a minimum time delay. Therefore, approaches using the CSP transformation and Riemannian geometry with a time delay of less than 500 ms may be in the future advantage.Рассматриваются наиболее перспективные методы классификации электроэнцефалографических сигналов при разработке неинвазивных интерфейсов мозг–компьютер и теоретических подходов для успешной классификации электроэнцефалографических паттернов. Приводится обзор работ, использующих для классификации риманову геометрию, методы глубокого обучения и различные варианты предобработки и кластеризации электроэнцефалографических сигналов, например общего пространственного фильтра. Среди прочих подходов предобработка электроэнцефалографических сигналов с применением общего пространственного фильтра часто используется как в офлайн, так и в онлайн режимах. Согласно исследованиям последних лет сочетание общего пространственного фильтра, линейного дискриминантного анализа, метода опорных векторов и нейронной сети с обратным распространением ошибки позволило достигнуть 91% точности при двухклассовой классификации с обратной связью в виде управления экзоскелетом. Исследований по использованию римановой геометрии в условиях онлайн очень мало, и на данный момент наилучшая точность при двухклассовой классификации составляет 69,3%. При этом в офлайн тестировании средний процент классификации в рассмотренных статьях для подходов с применением общего пространственного фильтра – 77,5±5,8%, сетей глубокого обучения – 81,7±4,7%, римановой геометрии – 90,2±6,6%. За счет нелинейных преобразований методы, основанные на римановой геометрии, а также на применении глубоких нейронных сетей сложной архитектуры, обеспечивают большую точность и способность к извлечению полезной информации из сигнала по сравнению с линейным преобразованием общего пространственного фильтра. Однако в условиях реального времени важна не только точность, но и минимальная временная задержка. Здесь преимущество может быть за подходами с использованием преобразования общего пространственного фильтра и римановой геометрии с временной задержкой менее 500 мс

Study of Adaptation Methods Towards Advanced Brain-computer Interfaces

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH