Automatic Detection of Eye Blinking Using the Generalized Ising Model

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a widely used technique to record electrical brain activity. It is prone to be contaminated by non-neuronal sources that can generate artifacts in the signal due to its sensitivity and its poor signal-to-noise ratio. One of the main challenges in analyzing EEG data is the systematical and effective removal of artifacts from the signal. Although many methods have already been introduced to approach this issue, there is still no robust method for handling all sources of contaminations. For example, eye blinking is a physiological artifact occurring very frequently in spontaneous EEG recordings and therefore, removing these artifacts in a systematic way is a compelling need. The aim of this research is to build an automated pipeline to detect eye blinking artifacts in EEG signals using the generalized Ising model to act as a pattern recognition algorithm. A sample blink pattern is extracted from a single subject whose blink events are validated and marked by an EEG expert. The generalized Ising Model Algorithm works as a fully automated method for identifying all epochs similar to the eye blink pattern. Using the proposed method to discriminate the blinks artifact in continuous EEG data yields optimistic results. From eight healthy subjects, the results show high level of accuracy (90.5 %)

Driver's attention during monotonous driving and visual stimulation (ERP experiment)

Hlavním přínosem této práce je zjistit, zda je možné předpovídat pozornost řidiče pomocí měření jeho/její mozkové činnosti. Během monotóního řízení má pozornost tendenci se snižovat. Výrazný pokles pozornosti zůsobený únavou může mít fatanální následky pro řidiče nebo ostatní účastníky silničního provozu. Jednou z metod měření mozkové aktivity je tzv. elektroencefalografie (EEG). Spolu s EEG signálemje možné pozorovat specifické nervové odervy spojené s kognitivní stimulací subjektu (řidiče). Tyto odezvy jsou nazývány evokované potenciály (ERP). Existuje hypotéza, která tvrdí, že únava způsobuje prodloužení doby výskytu dané ERP komponenty. Tento nárůst je spojen s úpadkem pozornosti. Cílem práce je navrhnout a provést experiment, který by hypotézu potvrdil. Dalším úkolem je vyvinout aplikaci pro detekci artefaktů v naměřeném signálu.Katedra informatiky a výpočetní technikyObhájenoThe major contribution of this thesis is to discover if it is possible to predict the driver?s attention by measurement of his/her brain activity. During monotonous driving attention tends to decrease. The drop of attention due to fatigue might have serious consequences for the driver and for other traffic participants as well. One method to measure human brain activity is called the electroencephalography (EEG). Together with the EEG signal it is possible to observe specific neuronal responses connected with cognitive stimulation of the subject. These responses are known as event-related potentials (ERP). There is a hypothesis claiming that fatigue causes the shift in latency of the defined ERP component. An increase of this latency is associated with a fade of attention. The goal is to design and perform the experiment which verifies the hypothesis. Another goal of the thesis is to design and develop an application for artifact detection

New approach in features extraction for EEG signal detection

4 pages, 3 figures.-- Contributed to: "Engineering the Future of Biomedicine", EMBC2009, 31st Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, Sep 2-6, 2009).This paper describes a new approach in features extraction using time-frequency distributions (TFDs) for detecting epileptic seizures to identify abnormalities in electroencephalogram (EEG). Particularly, the method extracts features using the Smoothed Pseudo Wigner-Ville distribution combined with the McAulay-Quatieri sinusoidal model and identifies abnormal neural discharges. We propose a new feature based on the length of the track that, combined with energy and frequency features, allows to isolate a continuous energy trace from another oscillations when an epileptic seizure is beginning. We evaluate our approach using data consisting of 16 different seizures from 6 epileptic patients. The results show that our extraction method is a suitable approach for automatic seizure detection, and opens the possibility of formulating new criteria to detect and analyze abnormal EEGs.This work has been funded by the Spain CICYT grant TEC2008-02473.Publicad

Validating and improving the correction of ocular artifacts in electro-encephalography

For modern applications of electro-encephalography, including brain computer interfaces and single-trial Event Related Potential detection, it is becoming increasingly important that artifacts are accurately removed from a recorded electro-encephalogram (EEG) without affecting the part of the EEG that reflects cerebral activity. Ocular artifacts are caused by movement of the eyes and the eyelids. They occur frequently in the raw EEG and are often the most prominent artifacts in EEG recordings. Their accurate removal is therefore an important procedure in nearly all electro-encephalographic research. As a result of this, a considerable number of ocular artifact correction methods have been introduced over the past decades. A selection of these methods, which contains some of the most frequently used correction methods, is given in Section 1.5. When two different correction methods are applied to the same raw EEG, this usually results in two different corrected EEGs. A measure for the accuracy of correction should indicate how well each of these corrected EEGs recovers the part of the raw EEG that truly reflects cerebral activity. The fact that this accuracy cannot be determined directly from a raw EEG is intrinsic to the need for artifact removal. If, based on a raw EEG, it would be possible to derive an exact reference on what the corrected EEG should be, then there would not be any need for adequate artifact correction methods. Estimating the accuracy of correction methods is mostly done either by using models to simulate EEGs and artifacts, or by manipulating the experimental data in such a way that the effects of artifacts to the raw EEG can be isolated. In this thesis, modeling of EEG and artifact is used to validate correction methods based on simulated data. A new correction method is introduced which, unlike all existing methods, uses a camera to monitor eye(lid) movements as a basis for ocular artifact correction. The simulated data is used to estimate the accuracy of this new correction method and to compare it against the estimated accuracy of existing correction methods. The results of this comparison suggest that the new method significantly increases correction accuracy compared to the other methods. Next, an experiment is performed, based on which the accuracy of correction can be estimated on raw EEGs. Results on this experimental data comply very well with the results on the simulated data. It is therefore concluded that using a camera during EEG recordings provides valuable extra information that can be used in the process of ocular artifact correction. In Chapter 2, a model is introduced that assists in estimating the accuracy of eye movement artifacts for simulated EEG recordings. This model simulates EEG and eye movement artifacts simultaneously. For this, the model uses a realistic representation of the head, multiple dipoles to model cerebral and ocular electrical activity, and the boundary element method to calculate changes in electrical potential at different positions on the scalp. With the model, it is possible to simulate different data sets as if they are recorded using different electrode configurations. Signal to noise ratios are used to assess the accuracy of these six correction methods for various electrode configurations before and after applying six different correction methods. Results show that out of the six methods, second order blind identification, SOBI, and multiple linear regression, MLR, correct most accurately overall as they achieve the highest rise in signal to noise ratio. The occurrence of ocular artifacts is linked to changes in eyeball orientation. In Chapter 2 an eye tracker is used to record pupil position, which is closely linked to eyeball orientation. The pupil position information is used in the model to simulate eye movements. Recognizing the potential benefit of using an eye tracker not only for simulations, but also for correction, Chapter 3 introduces an eye movement artifact correction method that exploits the pupil position information that is provided by an eye tracker. Other correction methods use the electrooculogram (EOG) and/or the EEG to estimate ocular artifacts. Because both the EEG and the EOG recordings are susceptive to cerebral activity as well as to ocular activity, these other methods are at risk of overcorrecting the raw EEG. Pupil position information provides a reference that is linked to the ocular artifact in the EEG but that cannot be affected by cerebral activity, and as a result the new correction method avoids having to solve traditionally problematic issues like forward/backward propagation and evaluating the accuracy of component extraction. By using both simulated and experimental data, it is determined how pupil position influences the raw EEG and it is found that this relation is linear or quadratic. A Kalman filter is used for tuning of the parameters that specify the relation. On simulated data, the new method performs very well, resulting in an SNR after correction of over 10 dB for various patterns of eye movements. When compared to the three methods that performed best in the evaluation of Chapter 2, only the SOBI method which performed best in that evaluation shows similar results for some of the eye movement patterns. However, a serious limitation of the correction method is its inability to correct blink artifacts. In order to increase the variety of applications for which the new method can be used, the new correction should be improved in a way that enables it to correct the raw EEG for blinking artifacts. Chapter 4 deals with implementing such improvements based on the idea that a more advanced eye-tracker should be able to detect both the pupil position and the eyelid position. The improved eye tracker-based ocular artifact correction method is named EYE. Driven by some practical limitations regarding the eye tracking device currently available to us, an alternative way to estimate eyelid position is suggested, based on an EOG recorded above one eye. The EYE method can be used with both the eye tracker information or with the EOG substitute. On simulated data, accuracy of the EYE method is estimated using the EOGbased eyelid reference. This accuracy is again compared against the six other correction methods. Two different SNR-based measures of accuracy are proposed. One of these quantifies the correction of the entire simulated data set and the other focuses on those segments containing simulated blinking artifacts. After applying EYE, an average SNR of at least 9 dB for both these measures is achieved. This implies that the power of the corrected signal is at least eight times the power of the remaining noise. The simulated data sets contain a wide range of eye movements and blink frequencies. For almost all of these data sets, 16 out of 20, the correction results for EYE are better than for any of the other evaluated correction method. On experimental data, the EYE method appears to adequately correct for ocular artifacts as well. As the detection of eyelid position from the EOG is in principle inferior to the detection of eyelid position with the use of an eye tracker, these results should also be considered as an indicator of even higher accuracies that could be obtained with a more advanced eye tracker. Considering the simplicity of the MLR method, this method also performs remarkably well, which may explain why EOG-based regression is still often used for correction. In Chapter 5, the simulation model of Chapter 2 is put aside and, alternatively, experimentally recorded data is manipulated in a way that correction inaccuracies can be highlighted. Correction accuracies of eight correction methods, including EYE, are estimated based on data that are recorded during stop-signal tasks. In the analysis of these tasks it is essential that ocular artifacts are adequately removed because the task-related ERPs, are located mostly at frontal electrode positions and are low-amplitude. These data are corrected and subsequently evaluated. For the eight methods, the overall ranking of estimated accuracy in Figure 5.3, corresponds very well with the correction accuracy of these methods on simulated data as was found in Chapter 4. In a single-trial correction comparison, results suggest that the EYE corrected EEG, is not susceptible to overcorrection, whereas the other corrected EEGs are

Emotions Detection based on a Single-electrode EEG Device

The study of emotions using multiple channels of EEG represents a widespread practice in the field of research related to brain computer interfaces (Brain Computer Interfaces). To date, few studies have been reported in the literature with a reduced number of channels, which when used in the detection of emotions present results that are less accurate than the rest. To detect emotions using an EEG channel and the data obtained is useful for classifying emotions with an accuracy comparable to studies in which there is a high number of channels, is of particular interest in this research framework. This article uses the Neurosky Maindwave device; which has a single electrode to acquire the EEG signal, Matlab software and IBM SPSS Modeler; which process and classify the signals respectively. The accuracy obtained in the detection of emotions in relation to the economic resources of the hardware dedicated to the acquisition of EEG signal is remarkable

Similarity analysis of EEG data based on self organizing map neural network

The Electroencephalography (EEG) is the recording of electrical activity along the scalp. This recorded data are very complex. EEG has a big role in several applications such as in the diagnosis of human brain diseases and epilepsy. Also, we can use the EEG signals to control an external device via Brain Computer Interface (BCI) by our mind. There are many algorithms to analyse the recorded EEG data, but it still remains one of the big challenges in the world. In this article, we extended our previous proposed method. Our extended method uses Self-organizing Map (SOM) as an EEG data classifier. The proposed method we can divide in following steps: capturing EEG raw data from the sensors, applying filters on this data, we will use the frequencies in the range from 0.5~Hz to 60~Hz, smoothing the data with 15-th order of Polynomial Curve Fitting, converting filtered data into text using Turtle Graphic, Lempel-Ziv complexity for measuring similarity between two EEG data trials and Self-Organizing Map Neural Network as a final classifiers. The experiment results show that our model is able to detect up to 96% finger movements correctly

New feature extraction approach for epileptic EEG signal detection using time-frequency distributions

10 pages, 6 figures.-- PMID: 20217264.This paper describes a new method to identify seizures in electroencephalogram (EEG) signals using feature extraction in time–frequency distributions (TFDs). Particularly, the method extracts features from the Smoothed Pseudo Wigner-Ville distribution using tracks estimated from the McAulay-Quatieri sinusoidal model. The proposed features are the length, frequency, and energy of the principal track. We evaluate the proposed scheme using several datasets and we compute sensitivity, specificity, F-score, receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve, and percentile bootstrap confidence to conclude that the proposed scheme generalizes well and is a suitable approach for automatic seizure detection at a moderate cost, also opening the possibility of formulating new criteria to detect, classify or analyze abnormal EEGs.This work has been funded by the Spain CICYT grant TEC2008-02473.Publicad

Noise Reduction of EEG Signals Using Autoencoders Built Upon GRU based RNN Layers

Understanding the cognitive and functional behaviour of the brain by its electrical activity is an important area of research. Electroencephalography (EEG) is a method that measures and record electrical activities of the brain from the scalp. It has been used for pathology analysis, emotion recognition, clinical and cognitive research, diagnosing various neurological and psychiatric disorders and for other applications. Since the EEG signals are sensitive to activities other than the brain ones, such as eye blinking, eye movement, head movement, etc., it is not possible to record EEG signals without any noise. Thus, it is very important to use an efficient noise reduction technique to get more accurate recordings. Numerous traditional techniques such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Independent Component Analysis (ICA), wavelet transformations and machine learning techniques were proposed for reducing the noise in EEG signals. The aim of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of stacked autoencoders built upon Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) based Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) layers (GRU-AE) against PCA. To achieve this, Harrell-Davis decile values for the reconstructed signals’ signal-to- noise ratio distributions were compared and it was found that the GRU-AE outperformed PCA for noise reduction of EEG signals

EEG artifact detection

Benito Núñez, IM. (2011). EEG artifact detection. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/10356.Archivo delegad

Automatic Sleep EEG Pattern Detection

Analýza mozkové aktivity je jednou z klícových vyšetrovacích metod v moderní spánkové medicíne a výzkumu.nalysis of recorded brain activity is one of the main investigation methods in modern sleep medicine and research