Brain-computer Interface Accuracy Research Articles

Intentional binding for noninvasive BCI control.

Noninvasive brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) allow to interact with the external environment by naturally bypassing the musculoskeletal system.
Making BCIs efficient and accurate is paramount to improve the reliability of real-life and clinical applications, from open-loop device control to closed-loop neurorehabilitation. By promoting sense of agency and embodiment, realistic setups including multimodal channels of communication, such as eye-gaze, and robotic prostheses aim to improve BCI performance. However, how the mental imagery command should be integrated in those hybrid systems so as to ensure the best interaction is still poorly understood.
To address this question, we performed a hybrid EEG-based BCI training involving healthy volunteers enrolled in a reach-and-grasp action operated by a robotic arm. Main results showed that the hand grasping motor imagery timing significantly affects the BCI accuracy evolution as well as the spatiotemporal brain dynamics. Larger accuracy improvement was obtained when motor imagery is performed just after the robot reaching, as compared to before or during the movement. The proximity with the subsequent robot grasping favored intentional binding, led to stronger motor-related brain activity, and primed the ability of sensorimotor areas to integrate information from regions implicated in higher-order cognitive functions.
Taken together, these findings provided fresh evidence about the effects of intentional binding on human behavior and cortical network dynamics that can be exploited to design a new generation of efficient brain-machine interfaces.

A brain functional network feature extraction method based on directed transfer function and graph theory for MI-BCI decoding tasks.

The development of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) technology has brought tremendous potential to various fields. In recent years, prominent research has focused on enhancing the accuracy of BCI decoding algorithms by effectively utilizing meaningful features extracted from electroencephalographic (EEG) signals. This paper proposes a method for extracting brain functional network features based on directed transfer function (DTF) and graph theory. The method incorporates the extracted brain network features with common spatial pattern (CSP) to enhance the performance of motor imagery (MI) classification task. The signals from each electrode of the EEG, utilizing a total of 32 channels, are used as input signals for the network nodes. In this study, 26 healthy participants were recruited to provide EEG data. The brain functional network is constructed in Alpha and Beta bands using the DTF method. The node degree (ND), clustering coefficient (CC), and global efficiency (GE) of the brain functional network are obtained using graph theory. The DTF network features and graph theory are combined with the traditional signal processing method, the CSP algorithm. The redundant network features are filtered out using the Lasso method, and finally, the fused features are classified using a support vector machine (SVM), culminating in a novel approach we have termed CDGL. For Beta frequency band, with 8 electrodes, the proposed CDGL method achieved an accuracy of 89.13%, a sensitivity of 90.15%, and a specificity of 88.10%, which are 14.10, 16.69, and 11.50% percentage higher than the traditional CSP method (75.03, 73.46, and 76.60%), respectively. Furthermore, the results obtained with 8 channels were superior to those with 4 channels (82.31, 83.35, and 81.74%), and the result for the Beta frequency band were better than those for the Alpha frequency band (87.42, 87.48, and 87.36%). Similar results were also obtained on two public datasets, where the CDGL algorithm's performance was found to be optimal. The feature fusion of DTF network and graph theory features enhanced CSP algorithm's performance in MI task classification. Increasing the number of channels allows for more EEG signal feature information, enhancing the model's sensitivity and discriminative ability toward specific activities in brain regions. It should be noted that the functional brain network features in the Beta band exhibit superior performance improvement for the algorithm compared to those in the Alpha band.

Optimizing Brain-Computer Interfaces through Spiking Neural Networks and Memristors

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have emerged as a transformative conduit bridging the human brain's intricate realms and computing systems' capabilities. However, numerous challenges remain in improving BCI accuracy, efficiency, and adaptability. This paper investigates the integration of spiking neural networks (SNNs) and memristors to optimize BCI performance. SNNs offer exceptional potential to enhance BCI accuracy through biomimetic modeling of biological neural networks. By emulating the brain's spatio-temporal signaling patterns, SNNs may significantly improve neural decoding precision. Meanwhile, memristors can simulate synaptic plasticity and potentially enable real-time adaptive learning in BCIs. Preliminary studies demonstrate substantially improved signal processing, feature extraction, and classification capabilities when using SNNs and memristors in BCIs. This neuroinspired integration offers a compelling vision for personalized BCIs that continuously adapt to individual users. However, realizing the full potential relies on addressing lingering technical hurdles as well as emerging ethical considerations around user autonomy, privacy, responsibility, and access. Ultimately, interdisciplinary collaboration remains imperative to harness the promising trajectory of optimized BCIs while navigating the multifaceted challenges ahead.

Motor priming to enhance the effect of physical therapy in people with spinal cord injury

Context Brain–Computer Interface (BCI) is an emerging neurorehabilitation therapy for people with spinal cord injury (SCI). Objective The study aimed to test whether priming the sensorimotor system using BCI-controlled functional electrical stimulation (FES) before physical practice is more beneficial than physical practice alone. Methods Ten people with subacute SCI participated in a randomized control trial where the experimental (N = 5) group underwent BCI-FES priming (∼15 min) before physical practice (30 min), while the control (N = 5) group performed physical practice (40 min) of the dominant hand. The primary outcome measures were BCI accuracy, adherence, and perceived workload. The secondary outcome measures were manual muscle test, grip strength, the range of motion, and Electroencephalography (EEG) measured brain activity. Results The average BCI accuracy was 85%. The experimental group found BCI-FES priming mentally demanding but not frustrating. Two participants in the experimental group did not complete all sessions due to early discharge. There were no significant differences in physical outcomes between the groups. The ratio between eyes closed to eyes opened EEG activity increased more in the experimental group (theta Pθ = 0.008, low beta Plβ = 0.009, and high beta Phβ = 1.48e-04) indicating better neurological outcomes. There were no measurable immediate effects of BCI-FES priming. Conclusion Priming the brain before physical therapy is feasible but may require more than 15 min. This warrants further investigation with an increased sample size.

The challenge of controlling an auditory BCI in the case of severe motor disability

BackgroundThe locked-in syndrome (LIS), due to a lesion in the pons, impedes communication. This situation can also be met after some severe brain injury or in advanced Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). In the most severe condition, the persons cannot communicate at all because of a complete oculomotor paralysis (Complete LIS or CLIS). This even prevents the detection of consciousness. Some studies suggest that auditory brain–computer interface (BCI) could restore a communication through a « yes–no» code.MethodsWe developed an auditory EEG-based interface which makes use of voluntary modulations of attention, to restore a yes–no communication code in non-responding persons. This binary BCI uses repeated speech sounds (alternating “yes” on the right ear and “no” on the left ear) corresponding to either frequent (short) or rare (long) stimuli. Users are instructed to pay attention to the relevant stimuli only. We tested this BCI with 18 healthy subjects, and 7 people with severe motor disability (3 “classical” persons with locked-in syndrome and 4 persons with ALS).ResultsWe report online BCI performance and offline event-related potential analysis. On average in healthy subjects, online BCI accuracy reached 86% based on 50 questions. Only one out of 18 subjects could not perform above chance level. Ten subjects had an accuracy above 90%. However, most patients could not produce online performance above chance level, except for two people with ALS who obtained 100% accuracy. We report individual event-related potentials and their modulation by attention. In addition to the classical P3b, we observed a signature of sustained attention on responses to frequent sounds, but in healthy subjects and patients with good BCI control only.ConclusionsAuditory BCI can be very well controlled by healthy subjects, but it is not a guarantee that it can be readily used by the target population of persons in LIS or CLIS. A conclusion that is supported by a few previous findings in BCI and should now trigger research to assess the reasons of such a gap in order to propose new and efficient solutions.Clinical trial registrations: No. NCT02567201 (2015) and NCT03233282 (2013).

P300-Based Brain-Computer Interface Speller Performance Estimation with Classifier-Based Latency Estimation.

Performance estimation is a necessary step in the development and validation of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) systems. Unfortunately, even modern BCI systems are slow, making collecting sufficient data for validation a time-consuming task for end users and experimenters alike. Yet without sufficient data, the random variation in performance can lead to false inferences about how well a BCI is working for a particular user. For example, P300 spellers commonly operate around 1-5 characters per minute. To estimate accuracy with a 5% resolution requires 20 characters (4-20 min). Despite this time investment, the confidence bounds for accuracy from 20 characters can be as much as ±23% depending on observed accuracy. A previously published method, Classifier-Based Latency Estimation (CBLE), was shown to be highly correlated with BCI accuracy. This work presents a protocol for using CBLE to predict a user's P300 speller accuracy from relatively few characters (~3-8) of typing data. The resulting confidence bounds are tighter than those produced by traditional methods. The method can thus be used to estimate BCI performance more quickly and/or more accurately.

Effect of alpha range activity on SSVEP decoding in brain-computer interfaces.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) facilitate direct communication between the brain and external devices. For BCI technology to be commercialized for wide scale applications, BCIs should be accurate, efficient, and exhibit consistency in performance for a wide variety of users. A core challenge is the physiological and anatomical differences amongst people, which causes a high variability amongst participants in BCI studies. Hence, it becomes necessary to analyze the mechanisms causing this variability and address them by improving the decoding algorithms. In this paper, a publicly available steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) dataset is analyzed to study the effect of SSVEP flicker on the endogenous alpha power and the subsequent overall effect on the classification accuracy of the participants. It was observed that the participants with classification accuracy below 95% showed increased alpha power in their brain activities. Incorrect prediction in the decoding algorithm was observed a maximum number of times when the predicted frequency was in the range 9-12 Hz. We conclude that frequencies between 9-12 Hz may result in below par performance in some participants when canonical correlation analysis is used for classification.Clinical relevance-If alpha-band frequencies are used for SSVEP stimulation, alpha power interference in EEG may alter BCI accuracy for some users.

Enhancing motor imagery detection efficacy using multisensory virtual reality priming.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) have been developed to allow users to communicate with the external world by translating brain activity into control signals. Motor imagery (MI) has been a popular paradigm in BCI control where the user imagines movements of e.g., their left and right limbs and classifiers are then trained to detect such intent directly from electroencephalography (EEG) signals. For some users, however, it is difficult to elicit patterns in the EEG signal that can be detected with existing features and classifiers. As such, new user control strategies and training paradigms have been highly sought-after to help improve motor imagery performance. Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as one potential tool where improvements in user engagement and level of immersion have shown to improve BCI accuracy. Motor priming in VR, in turn, has shown to further enhance BCI accuracy. In this pilot study, we take the first steps to explore if multisensory VR motor priming, where haptic and olfactory stimuli are present, can improve motor imagery detection efficacy in terms of both improved accuracy and faster detection. Experiments with 10 participants equipped with a biosensor-embedded VR headset, an off-the-shelf scent diffusion device, and a haptic glove with force feedback showed that significant improvements in motor imagery detection could be achieved. Increased activity in the six common spatial pattern filters used were also observed and peak accuracy could be achieved with analysis windows that were 2 s shorter. Combined, the results suggest that multisensory motor priming prior to motor imagery could improve detection efficacy.

Hybrid EEG-fNIRS Brain Computer Interface Based on Common Spatial Pattern by Using EEG-Informed General Linear Model

Hybrid brain computer interfaces (BCI) utilizing the high temporal resolution of electroencephalography (EEG) and the high spatial resolution of near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) are preferred over single-modal BCIs. However, due to the large dimensionality of the multi-class statistical features commonly used in fNIRS signals, it is easy to cause overfitting of the EEG-fNIRS hybrid BCI classifier. Therefore, a low-dimensional feature extraction method for fNIRS based on the EEG-informed fNIRS general linear model (GLM) analysis is proposed in this paper. First, a regression coefficient matrix is obtained by using the EEG-informed fNIRS GLM with a time window added, and the common spatial pattern (CSP) features of this regression coefficient matrix are extracted as the fNIRS features. Lastly, the fNIRS features were combined with the CSP features extracted from the optimal narrow band of EEG as hybrid features, and the support vector machine (SVM) method is used to classify the samples with hybrid features. The proposed method was tested on a publicly available motor imagery dataset. The classification accuracy using fNIRS signals alone reached 68.79% (oxygenated hemoglobin) and 68.62% (deoxygenated hemoglobin), and the classification accuracy of combining EEG-fNIRS features reached 79.48%, which was higher than other existing methods using the same dataset. By using this fNIRS feature extraction method, the problem of poor performance of CSP on fNIRS signals is solved, which not only enriches the processing methods of fNIRS signals, but also improves the classification accuracy of hybrid EEG-fNIRS BCI in motor imagery tasks.

Simultaneous multiple-stimulus auditory brain–computer interface with semi-supervised learning and prior probability distribution tuning

Objective. Auditory brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) enable users to select commands based on the brain activity elicited by auditory stimuli. However, existing auditory BCI paradigms cannot increase the number of available commands without decreasing the selection speed, because each stimulus needs to be presented independently and sequentially under the standard oddball paradigm. To solve this problem, we propose a double-stimulus paradigm that simultaneously presents multiple auditory stimuli. Approach. For addition to an existing auditory BCI paradigm, the best discriminable sound was chosen following a subjective assessment. The new sound was located on the right-hand side and presented simultaneously with an existing sound from the left-hand side. A total of six sounds were used for implementing the auditory BCI with a 6 × 6 letter matrix. We employ semi-supervised learning (SSL) and prior probability distribution tuning to improve the accuracy of the paradigm. The SSL method involved updating of the classifier weights, and their prior probability distributions were adjusted using the following three types of distributions: uniform, empirical, and extended empirical (e-empirical). The performance was evaluated based on the BCI accuracy and information transfer rate (ITR). Main results. The double-stimulus paradigm resulted in a BCI accuracy of 67.89 ± 11.46% and an ITR of 2.67 ± 1.09 bits min−1, in the absence of SSL and with uniform distribution. The proposed combination of SSL with e-empirical distribution improved the BCI accuracy and ITR to 74.59 ± 12.12% and 3.37 ± 1.27 bits min−1, respectively. The event-related potential analysis revealed that contralateral and right-hemispheric dominances contributed to the BCI performance improvement. Significance. Our study demonstrated that a BCI based on multiple simultaneous auditory stimuli, incorporating SSL and e-empirical prior distribution, can increase the number of commands without sacrificing typing speed beyond the acceptable level of accuracy.

A Hybrid Asynchronous Brain–Computer Interface Based on SSVEP and Eye-Tracking for Threatening Pedestrian Identification in Driving

A brain–computer interface (BCI) based on steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) has achieved remarkable performance in the field of automatic driving. Prolonged SSVEP stimuli can cause driver fatigue and reduce the efficiency of interaction. In this paper, a multi-modal hybrid asynchronous BCI system combining eye-tracking and EEG signals is proposed for dynamic threatening pedestrian identification in driving. Stimuli arrows of different frequencies and directions are randomly superimposed on pedestrian targets. Subjects scan the stimuli according to the direction of arrows until the threatening pedestrian is selected. The thresholds determined by offline experiments are used to distinguish between working and idle states of the asynchronous online experiments. Subjects need to judge and select potentially threatening pedestrians in online experiments according to their own subjective experience. The three proposed decisions filter out the results with low confidence and effectively improve the selection accuracy of hybrid BCI. The experimental results of six subjects show that the proposed hybrid asynchronous BCI system achieves better performance compared with a single SSVEP-BCI, with an average selection time of 1.33 s, an average selection accuracy of 95.83%, and an average information transfer rate (ITR) of 67.50 bits/min. These results indicate that our hybrid asynchronous BCI has great application potential in dynamic threatening pedestrian identification in driving.

Exploring the ability of stroke survivors in using the contralesional hemisphere to control a brain–computer interface

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have recently been shown to be clinically effective as a novel method of stroke rehabilitation. In many BCI-based studies, the activation of the ipsilesional hemisphere was considered a key factor required for motor recovery after stroke. However, emerging evidence suggests that the contralesional hemisphere also plays a role in motor function rehabilitation. The objective of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of the BCI in detecting motor imagery of the affected hand from contralesional hemisphere. We analyzed a large EEG dataset from 136 stroke patients who performed motor imagery of their stroke-impaired hand. BCI features were extracted from channels covering either the ipsilesional, contralesional or bilateral hemisphere, and the offline BCI accuracy was computed using 10 times 10-fold cross-validations. Our results showed that most stroke patients can operate the BCI using either their contralesional or ipsilesional hemisphere. Those with the ipsilesional BCI accuracy of less than 60% had significantly higher motor impairments than those with the ipsilesional BCI accuracy above 80%. Interestingly, those with the ipsilesional BCI accuracy of less than 60% achieved a significantly higher contralesional BCI accuracy, whereas those with the ipsilesional BCI accuracy more than 80% had significantly poorer contralesional BCI accuracy. This study suggests that contralesional BCI may be a useful approach for those with a high motor impairment who cannot accurately generate signals from ipsilesional hemisphere to effectively operate BCI.

BCI Accuracy Using Classifier-Based Latency Estimation and the Optimal Interstimulus Interval.

Detection of event-related potentials (ERPs) in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) allow for communication by individuals with neuromuscular disorders. Enhancing BCI accuracy may be possible through the exploration of the optimal interstimulus interval (ISI). Our objective is to investigate the relationship between BCI accuracy and the optimal ISI value for an individual. Using the previously developed classifier-based latency estimation (CBLE) [1], we investigated the relationship between the interstimulus interval (ISI) and P3 Speller BCI accuracy. Participants underwent two consecutive sessions in one day. The first session had a default ISI value of 120ms. An optimal ISI value calculated from the first session was used in the second. Ten subjects participated in the study. Of the ten, half received an optimal ISI value of 120ms and half 160ms. Accuracy differences after implementing the adjusted ISI ranged from -26.1 percent to 4.35 percent. Suggestions for additional experimental design adjustments are highlighted under the discussion portion of this manuscript.

Continuous Decoding of Hand Movement From EEG Signals Using Phase-Based Connectivity Features.

The principal goal of the brain-computer interface (BCI) is to translate brain signals into meaningful commands to control external devices or neuroprostheses to restore lost functions of patients with severe motor disabilities. The invasive recording of brain signals involves numerous health issues. Therefore, BCIs based on non-invasive recording modalities such as electroencephalography (EEG) are safer and more comfortable for the patients. The BCI requires reconstructing continuous movement parameters such as position or velocity for practical application of neuroprostheses. The BCI studies in continuous decoding have extensively relied on extracting features from the amplitude of brain signals, whereas the brain connectivity features have rarely been explored. This study aims to investigate the feasibility of using phase-based connectivity features in decoding continuous hand movements from EEG signals. To this end, the EEG data were collected from seven healthy subjects performing a 2D center-out hand movement task in four orthogonal directions. The phase-locking value (PLV) and magnitude-squared coherence (MSC) are exploited as connectivity features along with multiple linear regression (MLR) for decoding hand positions. A brute-force search approach is employed to find the best channel pairs for extracting features related to hand movements. The results reveal that the regression models based on PLV and MSC features achieve the average Pearson correlations of 0.43 ± 0.03 and 0.42 ± 0.06, respectively, between predicted and actual trajectories over all subjects. The delta and alpha band features have the most contribution in regression analysis. The results also demonstrate that both PLV and MSC decoding models lead to superior results on our data compared to two recently proposed feature extraction methods solely based on the amplitude or phase of recording signals (p < 0.05). This study verifies the ability of PLV and MSC features in the continuous decoding of hand movements with linear regression. Thus, our findings suggest that extracting features based on brain connectivity can improve the accuracy of trajectory decoder BCIs.

Novel Signal-to-Signal translation method based on StarGAN to generate artificial EEG for SSVEP-based brain-computer interfaces

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have shown promising performance in image-to-image translation. Inspired by StarGAN v2, which was introduced to address the multidomain image-to-image translation, the authors propose a novel multidomain signal-to-signal translation method to generate artificial steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) signals from resting electroencephalograms (EEGs). The proposed StarGAN-based signal-to-signal translation model was trained using EEG data acquired from three subjects and could successfully generate sufficient numbers of artificial SSVEP signals of 15 test participants using resting EEG data acquired over an extremely short time period (∼16 s) from each test participant. The possibility of improving the performance of SSVEP-based brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) was investigated by incorporating the artificially generated SSVEP signals and Combined-ECCA, which is proposed in this study as an extended version of combined canonical correlation analysis (Combined-CCA). Fifteen healthy individuals participated in the SSVEP-based BCI study to distinguish four visual stimuli with different flickering frequencies. To evaluate the degree of performance improvement, the average classification accuracy and information transfer rate (ITR) obtained using the proposed methods were compared with those obtained using filter bank CCA (FBCCA), a state-of-the-art training-free method for SSVEP-based BCIs. The performances in terms of the classification accuracy and ITR of SSVEP-based BCIs were significantly improved by using the proposed methods (95.47% and 40.09 bit/min) compared with those using FBCCA (92.03% and 31.80 bit/min, p < 0.05). In addition, more than four individual training trials per class were necessary to achieve better classification accuracy than that of the proposed approach if the conventional individual training approach was employed.

A Transfer Learning Algorithm to Reduce Brain-Computer Interface Calibration Time for Long-Term Users.

Current motor imagery-based brain-computer interface (BCI) systems require a long calibration time at the beginning of each session before they can be used with adequate levels of classification accuracy. In particular, this issue can be a significant burden for long term BCI users. This article proposes a novel transfer learning algorithm, called r-KLwDSA, to reduce the BCI calibration time for long-term users. The proposed r-KLwDSA algorithm aligns the user's EEG data collected in previous sessions to the few EEG trials collected in the current session, using a novel linear alignment method. Thereafter, the aligned EEG trials from the previous sessions and the few EEG trials from the current sessions are fused through a weighting mechanism before they are used for calibrating the BCI model. To validate the proposed algorithm, a large dataset containing the EEG data from 11 stroke patients, each performing 18 BCI sessions, was used. The proposed framework demonstrated a significant improvement in the classification accuracy, of over 4% compared to the session-specific algorithm, when there were as few as two trials per class available from the current session. The proposed algorithm was particularly successful in improving the BCI accuracy of the sessions that had initial session-specific accuracy below 60%, with an average improvement of around 10% in the accuracy, leading to more stroke patients having meaningful BCI rehabilitation.

SSVEP-Based Brain Computer Interface Controlled Soft Robotic Glove for Post-Stroke Hand Function Rehabilitation.

Soft robotic glove with brain computer interfaces (BCI) control has been used for post-stroke hand function rehabilitation. Motor imagery (MI) based BCI with robotic aided devices has been demonstrated as an effective neural rehabilitation tool to improve post-stroke hand function. It is necessary for a user of MI-BCI to receive a long time training, while the user usually suffers unsuccessful and unsatisfying results in the beginning. To propose another non-invasive BCI paradigm rather than MI-BCI, steady-state visually evoked potentials (SSVEP) based BCI was proposed as user intension detection to trigger the soft robotic glove for post-stroke hand function rehabilitation. Thirty post-stroke patients with impaired hand function were randomly and equally divided into three groups to receive conventional, robotic, and BCI-robotic therapy in this randomized control trial (RCT). Clinical assessment of Fugl-Meyer Motor Assessment of Upper Limb (FMA-UL), Wolf Motor Function Test (WMFT) and Modified Ashworth Scale (MAS) were performed at pre-training, post-training and three months follow-up. In comparing to other groups, The BCI-robotic group showed significant improvement after training in FMA full score (10.05 ± 8.03, p = 0.001), FMA shoulder/elbow (6.2 ± 5.94, p = 0.0004) and FMA wrist/hand (4.3 ± 2.83, p = 0.007), and WMFT (5.1 ± 5.53, p = 0.037). The improvement of FMA was significantly correlated with BCI accuracy (r = 0.714, p = 0.032). Recovery of hand function after rehabilitation of SSVEP-BCI controlled soft robotic glove showed better result than solely robotic glove rehabilitation, equivalent efficacy as results from previous reported MI-BCI robotic hand rehabilitation. It proved the feasibility of SSVEP-BCI controlled soft robotic glove in post-stroke hand function rehabilitation.

Performance Variation of a Somatosensory BCI Based on Imagined Sensation: A Large Population Study.

A proportion of users cannot achieve adequate brain-computer interface (BCI) control. The diversity of BCI modalities provides a way to solve this emerging issue. Here, we investigate the accuracy of a somatosensory BCI based on sensory imagery (SI). During the SI tasks, subjects were instructed to imagine a tactile sensation and to maintain the attention on the corresponding hand, as if there was tactile stimulus on the skin of the wrist. The performance across 106 healthy subjects in left- and right-hand SI discrimination was 78.9±13.2%. In 70.7% of the subjects the performance was above 70%. The SI task induced a contralateral cortical activation, and high-density EEG source localization showed that the real tactile stimulation and imagined tactile stimulation shared similar cortical activations within the somatosensory cortex. The somatosensory BCI based on SI provides a new signal modality for independent BCI development. Moreover, a combination of SI and other BCI modalities, such as motor imagery, may provide new avenues for further improving BCI usage and applicability, especially in those subjects unable to attain adequate BCI control with conventional BCI modalities.

Toward Assessment of Sound Localization in Disorders of Consciousness Using a Hybrid Audiovisual Brain-Computer Interface.

Behavioral assessment of sound localization in the Coma Recovery Scale-Revised (CRS-R) poses a significant challenge due to motor disability in patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC). Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), which can directly detect brain activities related to external stimuli, may thus provide an approach to assess DOC patients without the need for any physical behavior. In this study, a novel audiovisual BCI system was developed to simulate sound localization evaluation in CRS-R. Specifically, there were two alternatively flashed buttons on the left and right sides of the graphical user interface, one of which was randomly chosen as the target. The auditory stimuli of bell sounds were simultaneously presented by the ipsilateral loudspeaker during the flashing of the target button, which prompted patients to selectively attend to the target button. The recorded electroencephalography data were analyzed in real time to detect event-related potentials evoked by the target and further to determine whether the target was attended to or not. A significant BCI accuracy for a patient implied that he/she had sound localization. Among eighteen patients, eleven and four showed sound localization in the BCI and CRS-R, respectively. Furthermore, all patients showing sound localization in the CRS-R were among those detected by our BCI. The other seven patients who had no sound localization behavior in CRS-R were identified by the BCI assessment, and three of them showed improvements in the second CRS-R assessment after the BCI experiment. Thus, the proposed BCI system is promising for assisting the assessment of sound localization and improving the clinical diagnosis of DOC patients.

Ten-Hour Stable Noninvasive Brain-Computer Interface Realized by Semidry Hydrogel-Based Electrodes.

Noninvasive brain-computer interface (BCI) has been extensively studied from many aspects in the past decade. In order to broaden the practical applications of BCI technique, it is essential to develop electrodes for electroencephalogram (EEG) collection with advanced characteristics such as high conductivity, long-term effectiveness, and biocompatibility. In this study, we developed a silver-nanowire/PVA hydrogel/melamine sponge (AgPHMS) semidry EEG electrode for long-lasting monitoring of EEG signal. Benefiting from the water storage capacity of PVA hydrogel, the electrolyte solution can be continuously released to the scalp-electrode interface during used. The electrolyte solution can infiltrate the stratum corneum and reduce the scalp-electrode impedance to 10 kΩ-15 kΩ. The flexible structure enables the electrode with mechanical stability, increases the wearing comfort, and reduces the scalp-electrode gap to reduce contact impedance. As a result, a long-term BCI application based on measurements of motion-onset visual evoked potentials (mVEPs) shows that the 3-hour BCI accuracy of the new electrode (77% to 100%) is approximately the same as that of conventional electrodes supported by a conductive gel during the first hour. Furthermore, the BCI system based on the new electrode can retain low contact impedance for 10 hours on scalp, which greatly improved the ability of BCI technique.