Classification of imaginary movements in ECoG with a hybrid approach based on multi-dimensional Hilbert-SVM solution

Abstract

The study presented in this paper shows that electrocorticographic (ECoG) signals can be classified for making use of a human brain–computer interface (BCI) field. The results show that certain invariant phase transition features can be reliably used to classify two types of imagined movements accurately. Those are the left small-finger and tongue movements. Our approach consists of two main parts: channel selection based on Tsallis entropy in Hilbert domain and the nonlinear classification of motor imagery with support vector machines (SVMs). The new approach, based on Hilbert and statistical/entropy measurements, were combined with SVMs based on admissible kernels for classification purposes. The classification accuracy rates were 95% (264/278) and 73% (73/100) for training and testing sets, respectively. The results support the use of classification methods for ECoG-based BCIs.