Self-paced Brain Computer Interface System Research Articles

Development of a brain-computer interface for patients in the critical care setting.

ObjectiveBehaviorally unresponsive patients in intensive care units (ICU) are unable to consistently and effectively communicate their most fundamental physical needs. Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) technology has been established in the clinical context, but faces challenges in the critical care environment. Contrary to cue-based BCIs, which allow activation only during pre-determined periods of time, self-paced BCI systems empower patients to interact with others at any time. The study aims to develop a self-paced BCI for patients in the intensive care unit.MethodsBCI experiments were conducted in 18 ICU patients and 5 healthy volunteers. The proposed self-paced BCI system analyzes EEG activity from patients while these are asked to control a beeping tone by performing a motor task (i.e., opening and closing a hand). Signal decoding is performed in real time and auditory feedback given via headphones. Performance of the BCI system was judged based on correlation between the optimal and the observed performance.ResultsAll 5 healthy volunteers were able to successfully perform the BCI task, compared to chance alone (p<0.001). 5 of 14 (36%) conscious ICU patients were able to perform the BCI task. One of these 5 patients was quadriplegic and controlled the BCI system without any hand movements. None of the 4 unconscious patients were able to perform the BCI task.ConclusionsMore than one third of conscious ICU patients and all healthy volunteers were able to gain control over the self-paced BCI system. The initial 4 unconscious patients were not. Future studies will focus on studying the ability of behaviorally unresponsive patients with cognitive motor dissociation to control the self-paced BCI system.

L1-Penalized N-way PLS for subset of electrodes selection in BCI experiments

Recently, the N-way partial least squares (NPLS) approach was reported as an effective tool for neuronal signal decoding and brain–computer interface (BCI) system calibration. This method simultaneously analyzes data in several domains. It combines the projection of a data tensor to a low dimensional space with linear regression. In this paper the L1-Penalized NPLS is proposed for sparse BCI system calibration, allowing uniting the projection technique with an effective selection of subset of features. The L1-Penalized NPLS was applied for the binary self-paced BCI system calibration, providing selection of electrodes subset. Our BCI system is designed for animal research, in particular for research in non-human primates.

A Robust and Self-Paced BCI System Based on a Four Class SSVEP Paradigm: Algorithms and Protocols for a High-Transfer-Rate Direct Brain Communication

In this paper, we present, with particular focus on the adopted processing and identification chain and protocol-related solutions, a whole self-paced brain-computer interface system based on a 4-class steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) paradigm. The proposed system incorporates an automated spatial filtering technique centred on the common spatial patterns (CSPs) method, an autoscaled and effective signal features extraction which is used for providing an unsupervised biofeedback, and a robust self-paced classifier based on the discriminant analysis theory. The adopted operating protocol is structured in a screening, training, and testing phase aimed at collecting user-specific information regarding best stimulation frequencies, optimal sources identification, and overall system processing chain calibration in only a few minutes. The system, validated on 11 healthy/pathologic subjects, has proven to be reliable in terms of achievable communication speed (up to 70 bit/min) and very robust to false positive identifications.

A self-paced brain–computer interface system with a low false positive rate

The performance of current EEG-based self-paced brain–computer interface (SBCI) systems is not suitable for most practical applications. In this paper, an improved SBCI that uses features extracted from three neurological phenomena (movement-related potentials, changes in the power of Mu rhythms and changes in the power of Beta rhythms) to detect an intentional control command in noisy EEG signals is proposed. The proposed system achieves a high true positive (TP) to false positive (FP) ratio. To extract features for each neurological phenomenon in every EEG signal, a method that consists of a stationary wavelet transform followed by matched filtering is developed. For each neurological phenomenon in every EEG channel, features are classified using a support vector machine classifier (SVM). For each neurological phenomenon, a multiple classifier system (MCS) then combines the outputs of the SVMs. Another MCS combines the outputs of MCSs designed for the three neurological phenomena. Various configurations for combining the outputs of these MCSs are considered. A hybrid genetic algorithm (HGA) is proposed to simultaneously select the features, the values of the classifiers' parameters and the configuration for combining MCSs that yield the near optimal performance. Analysis of the data recorded from four able-bodied subjects shows a significant performance improvement over previous SBCIs.