Analysis of EEG signal by flicker-noise spectroscopy: identification of right-/left-hand movement imagination.

A Broniec

doi:10.1007/s11517-016-1491-z

Abstract

Flicker-noise spectroscopy (FNS) is a general phenomenological approach to analyzing dynamics of complex nonlinear systems by extracting information contained in chaotic signals. The main idea of FNS is to describe an information hidden in correlation links, which are present in the chaotic component of the signal, by a set of parameters. In the paper, FNS is used for the analysis of electroencephalography signal related to the hand movement imagination. The signal has been parametrized in accordance with the FNS method, and significant changes in the FNS parameters have been observed, at the time when the subject imagines the movement. For the right-hand movement imagination, abrupt changes (visible as a peak) of the parameters, calculated for the data recorded from the left hemisphere, appear at the time corresponding to the initial moment of the imagination. In contrary, for the left-hand movement imagination, the meaningful changes in the parameters are observed for the data recorded from the right hemisphere. As the motor cortex is activated mainly contralaterally to the hand, the analysis of the FNS parameters allows to distinguish between the imagination of the right- and left-hand movement. This opens its potential application in the brain–computer interface.

Highlights

Neuropsychological studies on processes occurring in the brain during the motor imagery (MI) show that similar parts of the brain are involved in the movement imagination as well as its real performance [11,12,13, 27]
First, we present the maps of event-related desynchronization (ERD)/event-related synchronization (ERS) related to the hand movement imagination in the time– frequency plane
The EEG-based Brain– computer interface (BCI) systems have reached an asymptotic trend in the accuracy of performance; it is still characterized by a significant error rate [23, 40]

Summary

Introduction

Neuropsychological studies on processes occurring in the brain during the motor imagery (MI) show that similar parts of the brain are involved in the movement imagination as well as its real performance [11,12,13, 27]. The main difference between the movement execution and its imagination is that in the latter case, the movement performance is blocked at some level of the corticospinal information transfer [8,9,10, 24, 25] This phenomenon is observed in the sport psychology, where many examinations show that mental exercises have a positive effect on the later movement execution [14, 19, 46]. Similarity between the movement imagination and the real movement was confirmed by the research, in which healthy patients and patients with motor disabilities were subjected to the neuropsychological observation [16, 33]. The present paper deals with the second of them and shows that FNS can be an alternative method for the feature extraction in the analysis of the EEG signal related to the imagination of hand movement

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