Dual Adaptive Filtering by Optimal Projection Applied to Filter Muscle Artifacts on EEG and Comparative Study

Muscle artifacts constitute one of the major problems in electroencephalogram (EEG) examinations, particularly for the diagnosis of epilepsy, where pathological rhythms occur within the same frequency bands as those of artifacts. This paper proposes to use the method dual adaptive filtering by optimal projection (DAFOP) to automatically remove artifacts while preserving true cerebral signals. DAFOP is a two-step method. The first step consists in applying the common spatial pattern (CSP) method to two frequency windows to identify the slowest components which will be considered as cerebral sources. The two frequency windows are defined by optimizing convolutional filters. The second step consists in using a regression method to reconstruct the signal independently within various frequency windows. This method was evaluated by two neurologists on a selection of 114 pages with muscle artifacts, from 20 clinical recordings of awake and sleeping adults, subject to pathological signals and epileptic seizures. A blind comparison was then conducted with the canonical correlation analysis (CCA) method and conventional low-pass filtering at 30 Hz. The filtering rate was 84.3% for muscle artifacts with a 6.4% reduction of cerebral signals even for the fastest waves. DAFOP was found to be significantly more efficient than CCA and 30 Hz filters. The DAFOP method is fast and automatic and can be easily used in clinical EEG recordings

EEG filtering based on blind source separation (BSS) for early detection of Alzheimer's disease

Objective: Development of an EEG preprocessing technique for improvement of detection of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The technique is based on filtering of EEG data using blind source separation (BSS) and projection of components which are possibly sensitive to cortical neuronal impairment found in early stages of AD. Method: Artifact-free 20 s intervals of raw resting EEG recordings from 22 patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) who later proceeded to AD and 38 age-matched normal controls were decomposed into spatio-temporally decorrelated components using BSS algorithm ‘AMUSE’. Filtered EEG was obtained by back projection of components with the highest linear predictability. Relative power of filtered data in delta, theta, alpha1, alpha2, beta1, and beta 2 bands were processed with Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). Results: Preprocessing improved the percentage of correctly classified patients and controls computed with jack-knifing cross-validation from 59 to 73% and from 76 to 84%, correspondingly. Conclusions: The proposed approach can significantly improve the sensitivity and specificity of EEG based diagnosis. Significance: Filtering based on BSS can improve the performance of the existing EEG approaches to early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. It may also have potential for improvement of EEG classification in other clinical areas or fundamental research. The developed method is quite general and flexible, allowing for various extensions and improvements. q 2004 Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd. on behalf of International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology

Automatic artifacts removal from epileptic EEG using a hybrid algorithm

Electroencephalogram (EEG) examination plays a very important role in the diagnosis of disorders related to epilepsy in clinic. However, epileptic EEG is often contaminated with lots of artifacts such as electrocardiogram (ECG), electromyogram (EMG) and electrooculogram (EOG). These artifacts confuse EEG interpretation, while rejecting EEG segments containing artifacts probably results in a substantial data loss and it is very time-consuming. The purpose of this study is to develop a novel algorithm for removing artifacts from epileptic EEG automatically. The collected multi-channel EEG data are decomposed into statistically independent components with Independent Component Analysis (ICA). Then temporal and spectral features of each independent component, including Hurst exponent, skewness, kurtosis, largest Lyapunov exponent and frequency-band energy extracted with wavelet packet decomposition, are calculated to quantify the characteristics of different artifact components. These features are imported into trained support vector machine to determine whether the independent components represent EEG activity or artifactual signals. Finally artifact-free EEGs are obtained by reconstructing the signal with artifact-free components. The method is evaluated with EEG recordings acquired from 15 epilepsy patients. Compared with previous work, the proposed method can remove artifacts such as baseline drift, ECG, EMG, EOG, and power frequency interference automatically and efficiently, while retaining important features for epilepsy diagnosis such as interictal spikes and ictal segments

A Method for Optimizing the Artifact Subspace Reconstruction Performance in Low-Density EEG

— Electroencephalogram (EEG) plays a significant role in the analysis of cerebral activity, although the recorded electrical brain signals are always contaminated with artifacts. This represents the major issue limiting the use of EEG in daily life applications, as artifact removal process still remains a challenging task. Among the available methodologies, Artifact Subspace Reconstruction (ASR) is a promising tool that can effectively remove transient or large-amplitude artifacts. However, the effectiveness of ASR and the optimal choice of its parameters have been validated only for high-density EEG acquisitions. In this regard, the present study proposes an enhanced procedure for the optimal individuation of ASR parameters, in order to successfully remove artifact in lowdensity EEG acquisitions (down to four channels). The proposed method starts from the analysis of real EEG data, to generate a large semi-simulated dataset with similar characteristics. Through a finetuning procedure on this semi-simulated data, the proposed method identifies the optimal parameters to be used for artifact removal on real data. The results show that the algorithm achieves an efficient removal of artifacts preserving brain signal information, also in low-density EEG signals, thus favoring the adoption of EEG also for more portable and/or daily-life applications

Identification of audio evoked response potentials in ambulatory EEG data

Electroencephalography (EEG) is commonly used for observing brain function over a period of time. It employs a set of invasive electrodes on the scalp to measure the electrical activity of the brain. EEG is mainly used by researchers and clinicians to study the brain’s responses to a specific stimulus - the event-related potentials (ERPs). Different types of undesirable signals, which are known as artefacts, contaminate the EEG signal. EEG and ERP signals are very small (in the order of microvolts); they are often obscured by artefacts with much larger amplitudes in the order of millivolts. This greatly increases the difficulty of interpreting EEG and ERP signals.Typically, ERPs are observed by averaging EEG measurements made with many repetitions of the stimulus. The average may require many tens of repetitions before the ERP signal can be observed with any confidence. This greatly limits the study and useof ERPs. This project explores more sophisticated methods of ERP estimation from measured EEGs. An Optimal Weighted Mean (OWM) method is developed that forms a weighted average to maximise the signal to noise ratio in the mean. This is developedfurther into a Bayesian Optimal Combining (BOC) method where the information in repetitions of ERP measures is combined to provide a sequence of ERP estimations with monotonically decreasing uncertainty. A Principal Component Analysis (PCA) isperformed to identify the basis of signals that explains the greatest amount of ERP variation. Projecting measured EEG signals onto this basis greatly reduces the noise in measured ERPs. The PCA filtering can be followed by OWM or BOC. Finally, crosschannel information can be used. The ERP signal is measured on many electrodes simultaneously and an improved estimate can be formed by combining electrode measurements. A MAP estimate, phrased in terms of Kalman Filtering, is developed using all electrode measurements.The methods developed in this project have been evaluated using both synthetic and measured EEG data. A synthetic, multi-channel ERP simulator has been developed specifically for this project.Numerical experiments on synthetic ERP data showed that Bayesian Optimal Combining of trial data filtered using a combination of PCA projection and Kalman Filtering, yielded the best estimates of the underlying ERP signal. This method has been applied to subsets of real Ambulatory Electroencephalography (AEEG) data, recorded while participants performed a range of activities in different environments. From this analysis, the number of trials that need to be collected to observe the P300 amplitude and delay has been calculated for a range of scenarios

Automatic Classification of Artifactual ICA-Components for Artifact Removal in EEG Signals

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Artifacts contained in EEG recordings hamper both, the visual interpretation by experts as well as the algorithmic processing and analysis (e.g. for Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) or for Mental State Monitoring). While hand-optimized selection of source components derived from Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to clean EEG data is widespread, the field could greatly profit from automated solutions based on Machine Learning methods. Existing ICA-based removal strategies depend on explicit recordings of an individual's artifacts or have not been shown to reliably identify muscle artifacts.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We propose an automatic method for the classification of general artifactual source components. They are estimated by TDSEP, an ICA method that takes temporal correlations into account. The linear classifier is based on an optimized feature subset determined by a Linear Programming Machine (LPM). The subset is composed of features from the frequency-, the spatial- and temporal domain. A subject independent classifier was trained on 640 TDSEP components (reaction time (RT) study, n = 12) that were hand labeled by experts as artifactual or brain sources and tested on 1080 new components of RT data of the same study. Generalization was tested on new data from two studies (auditory Event Related Potential (ERP) paradigm, n = 18; motor imagery BCI paradigm, n = 80) that used data with different channel setups and from new subjects.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Based on six features only, the optimized linear classifier performed on level with the inter-expert disagreement (<it><</it>10% Mean Squared Error (MSE)) on the RT data. On data of the auditory ERP study, the same pre-calculated classifier generalized well and achieved 15% MSE. On data of the motor imagery paradigm, we demonstrate that the discriminant information used for BCI is preserved when removing up to 60% of the most artifactual source components.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We propose a universal and efficient classifier of ICA components for the subject independent removal of artifacts from EEG data. Based on linear methods, it is applicable for different electrode placements and supports the introspection of results. Trained on expert ratings of large data sets, it is not restricted to the detection of eye- and muscle artifacts. Its performance and generalization ability is demonstrated on data of different EEG studies.</p

Low-Density EEG Correction With Multivariate Decomposition and Subspace Reconstruction

A hybrid method is proposed for removing artifacts from electroencephalographic (EEG) signals. This relies on the integration of artifact subspace reconstruction (ASR) with multivariate empirical mode decomposition (EMD). The method can be applied when few EEG sensors are available, a condition in which existing techniques are not effective, and it was tested with two public datasets: 1) semisynthetic data and 2) experimental data with artifacts. One to four EEG sensors were taken into account, and the proposal was compared to both ASR and multivariate EMD (MEMD) alone. The proposed method efficiently removed muscular, ocular, or eye-blink artifacts on both semisynthetic and experimental data. Unexpectedly, the ASR alone also showed compatible performance on semisynthetic data. However, ASR did not work properly when experimental data were considered. Finally, MEMD was found less effective than both ASR and MEMD-ASR

Artifact Removal Methods in EEG Recordings: A Review

To obtain the correct analysis of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, non-physiological and physiological artifacts should be removed from EEG signals. This study aims to give an overview on the existing methodology for removing physiological artifacts, e.g., ocular, cardiac, and muscle artifacts. The datasets, simulation platforms, and performance measures of artifact removal methods in previous related research are summarized. The advantages and disadvantages of each technique are discussed, including regression method, filtering method, blind source separation (BSS), wavelet transform (WT), empirical mode decomposition (EMD), singular spectrum analysis (SSA), and independent vector analysis (IVA). Also, the applications of hybrid approaches are presented, including discrete wavelet transform - adaptive filtering method (DWT-AFM), DWT-BSS, EMD-BSS, singular spectrum analysis - adaptive noise canceler (SSA-ANC), SSA-BSS, and EMD-IVA. Finally, a comparative analysis for these existing methods is provided based on their performance and merits. The result shows that hybrid methods can remove the artifacts more effectively than individual methods