Decoding Voluntary Movement of Single Hand Based on Analysis of Brain Connectivity by Using EEG Signals

Ting Li,Jinhua Zhang,Baozeng Wang,Tao Xue

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2018.00381

Abstract

Research about decoding neurophysiological signals mainly aims to elucidate the details of human motion control from the perspective of neural activity. We performed brain connectivity analysis with EEG to propose a brain functional network (BFN) and used a feature extraction algorithm for decoding the voluntary hand movement of a subject. By analyzing the characteristic parameters obtained from the BFN, we extracted the most important electrode nodes and frequencies for identifying the direction of movement of a hand. The results demonstrated that the most sensitive EEG components were for frequencies delta, theta, and gamma1 from electrodes F4, F8, C3, Cz, C4, CP4, T3, and T4. Finally, we proposed a model for decoding voluntary movement of the right hand by using a hierarchical linear model (HLM). Through a voluntary hand movement experiment in a spiral trajectory, the Poisson coefficient between the measurement trajectory and the decoding trajectory was used as a test standard to compare the HLM with the traditional multiple linear regression model. It was found that the decoding model based on the HLM obtained superior results. This paper contributes a feature extraction method based on brain connectivity analysis that can mine more comprehensive feature information related to a specific mental state of a subject. The decoding model based on the HLM possesses a strong structure for data manipulation that facilitates precise decoding.

Highlights

Research about decoding the neurophysiological signals from the human brain aims to translate them into control signals for external devices
Brain signals have been adopted in Brain-Computer Interface system (BCI), including electrocorticography (ECoG) (Miller et al, 2010; Pistohl et al, 2012), electroencephalography (EEG) (Wolpaw and McFarland, 2004; Bradberry et al, 2010), functional magnetic resonance imaging (Yoo et al, 2004; Sitaram et al, 2007), magnetoencephalography (MEG) (Boostani and Moradi, 2003; Bradberry et al, 2009), and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) (Coyle et al, 2007) signals
Based on the discussion above, we propose a method for decoding voluntary hand movement based on an analysis of brain connectivity using EEG signals

Summary

Introduction

Research about decoding the neurophysiological signals from the human brain aims to translate them into control signals for external devices. Brain signals have been adopted in BCI, including electrocorticography (ECoG) (Miller et al, 2010; Pistohl et al, 2012), electroencephalography (EEG) (Wolpaw and McFarland, 2004; Bradberry et al, 2010), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) (Yoo et al, 2004; Sitaram et al, 2007), magnetoencephalography (MEG) (Boostani and Moradi, 2003; Bradberry et al, 2009), and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) (Coyle et al, 2007) signals. Both fMRI and fNIR are based on changes in the cerebral blood flow, an inherently slow response (Khan et al, 2014)

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