Abstract
In stroke rehabilitation, motor imagery based on a brain-computer interface is an extremely useful method to control an external device and utilize neurofeedback. Many studies have reported on the classification performance of motor imagery to decode individual fingers in stroke patients compared with healthy controls. However, classification performance for a given limb is still low because the differences between patients owing to brain reorganization after stroke are not considered. We used electroencephalography signals from eleven healthy controls and eleven stroke patients in this study. The subjects performed a finger tapping task during motor execution, and motor imagery was performed with the dominant and affected hands in the healthy controls and stroke patients, respectively. All fingers except for the thumb were classified using the proposed framework based on a voting module. The averaged four-class accuracies during motor execution and motor imagery were 53.16 ± 8.42% and 46.94 ± 5.99% for the healthy controls and 53.17 ± 14.09% and 66.00 ± 14.96% for the stroke patients, respectively. Importantly, the classification accuracies in the stroke patients were statistically higher than those in healthy controls during motor imagery. However, there was no significant difference between the accuracies of motor execution and motor imagery. These findings show the potential for high classification performance for a given limb during motor imagery in stroke patients. These results can also provide insights into controlling an external device on the basis of a brain-computer interface.
Highlights
S TROKE is a major cause of adult neurological disorders in most countries and usually damages particular regions of the brain, causing functional disorders [1]
Brain–computer interface (BCI) has been frequently used for motor rehabilitation, and its effectiveness has been proven in stroke patients [3], [4] as it supports their quality of life and assists communication using external devices [5], [6]
In the case of healthy controls using their dominant hands and stroke patients with left ipsilesional side using their right hands, spatial activation was mainly observed in the left hemisphere near the motor cortex
Summary
S TROKE is a major cause of adult neurological disorders in most countries and usually damages particular regions of the brain, causing functional disorders [1]. Stroke survivors generally suffer from motor and cognitive impairments, which are directly related to their quality of life; rehabilitation is important for recovering from such functional damage [2]. Brain–computer interface (BCI) has been frequently used for motor rehabilitation, and its effectiveness has been proven in stroke patients [3], [4] as it supports their quality of life and assists communication using external devices [5], [6]. BCIs have been used to assist patients who need these technologies to rehabilitate their motor function directly or enhance their quality of life [7]. Patients who have suffered acute stroke and have reduced motor performance have limited use for such methods In other words, this training is directly affected by the residual motor performance [14].
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