Time-resolved EEG signal analysis for motor imagery activity recognition

Accurately characterizing brain activity requires detailed feature analysis in the temporal, spatial, and spectral domains. While previous research has proposed various spatial and spectral feature extraction methods to distinguish between different cognitive tasks, temporal feature analysis for each separate brain region and frequency band has been largely overlooked. This study introduces two novel approaches for recognizing cognitive activity: temporal entropic profiling and time-aligned common spatio-spectral patterns analysis. These approaches capture and use discriminative short-lived signal segments for motor imagery activity recognition. In Approach-1, we evaluated nine different measures to determine timing parameters that showed altered behavior associated with maximal inter-activity differences, which we then used in a machine-learning framework. In Approach-2, we used the best-performing signal characteristic measures from Approach-1 to determine the optimum latency of each channel at each frequency band for a CSP-based activity recognition strategy. We evaluated both approaches on two online available motor imagery EEG datasets and achieved average recognition accuracy levels of 86%. We compared our methods with four established BCI methods. The performance results show that our approaches exceeded the benchmark methods' performances, with notable improvements in the proposed time-aligned common spatio-spectral patterns approach. This study demonstrates that motor imagery recognition performance is improved when a temporal analysis is adopted alongside spatio-spectral neural feature analysis and that timing parameters associated with the maximal entropic difference of EEG segments to the cognitive tasks varied between different brain regions and subjects.Acknowledgement This study was supported in part by grant with number 117E784 and by grant with number 121E122 awarded by The Scientific andTechnological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) to Dr. Bilge Karacali.Scientific andTechnological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) [117E784, 121E122

On the characterization of cognitive tasks using activity-specific short-lived synchronization between electroencephalography channels

Accurate characterization of brain activity during a cognitive task is challenging due to the dynamically changing and the complex nature of the brain. The majority of the proposed approaches assume stationarity in brain activity and disregard the systematic timing organization among brain regions during cognitive tasks. In this study, we propose a novel cognitive activity recognition method that captures the activity-specific timing parameters from training data that elicits maximal average short-lived pairwise synchronization between electroencephalography signals. We evaluated the characterization power of the activity-specific timing parameter triplets in a motor imagery activity recognition framework. The activity-specific timing parameter triplets consist of latency of the maximally synchronized signal segments from activity onset Delta t, the time lag between maximally synchronized signal segments t, and the duration of the maximally synchronized signal segments w. We used cosine-based similarity, wavelet bi-coherence, phase-locking value, phase coherence value, linearized mutual information, and cross-correntropy to calculate the channel synchronizations at the specific timing parameters. Recognition performances as well as statistical analyses on both BCI Competition-III dataset IVa and PhysioNet Motor Movement/Imagery dataset, indicate that the interchannel short-lived synchronization calculated using activity-specific timing parameter triplets elicit significantly distinct synchronization profiles for different motor imagery tasks and can thus reliably be used for cognitive task recognition purposes. (C) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Using chemosensory-induced EEG signals to identify patients with de novo Parkinson's disease

Objective: Parkinson's disease (PD) patients generally exhibit an olfactory loss. Hence, psychophysical or electrophysiological tests are used for diagnosis. However, these tests are susceptible to the subjects’ behavioral response bias and require advanced techniques for an accurate analysis. Proposed Approach: Using well-known feature extraction methods, we characterized chemosensory-induced EEG responses of the participants to classify whether they have PD. The classification was performed for different time intervals after chemosensory stimulation to see which temporal segment better separates healthy controls and subjects with de novo PD. Results: The performances show that entropy and connectivity features discriminate effectively PD and HC participants when olfactory-induced EEG signals were used. For these methods, discrimination is over 80% for segments 100–700 and 200–800 milliseconds after stimulus onset. Comparison with Existing Methods: We compared the performance of our framework with linear predictive coding, bispectrum, wavelet entropy-based methods, and TDI score-based classification. While the entropy- and connectivity-based methods elicited the highest classification performances for olfactory stimuli, the linear predictive coding-based method elicited slightly higher performance than our framework when the trigeminal stimuli were used. Conclusion: This is one of the first studies that use chemosensory-induced EEG signals along with different feature extraction methods to classify healthy subjects and subjects with de novo PD. Our results show that entropy and functional connectivity methods unravel the chemosensory-induced neural dynamics encapsulating critical information about the subjects’ olfactory performance. Furthermore, time- and frequency-resolved feature analysis is beneficial for capturing disease-affected neural patterns