Synchronous Brain-computer Interface Research Articles

Average Time Consumption Per Character - a Practical Performance Metric for Generic Synchronous BCI Spellers.

The information transfer rate (ITR) is widely accepted as a performance metric for generic brain-computer interface (BCI) spellers, while it is noticeable that the communication speed given by ITR is actually an upper bound which however can never be reached in real systems. A new performance metric is therefore needed. In this paper, a new metric named average time consumption per character (ATCPC) is proposed. It quantifies how long it takes on average to type one character using a typical synchronous BCI speller. To analytically derive ATCPC, the real typing process is modelled with a random walk on a graph. Misclassification and backspace are carefully characterized. A close-form formula of ATCPC is obtained through computing the hitting time of the random walk. The new metric is validated through simulated typing experiments and compared with ITR. Firstly, the formula and simulation show a good consistency. Secondly, ITR always tends to overestimate the communication speed, while ATCPC is more realistic. The proposed ATCPC metric is valid. ATCPC is a qualified substitute for ITR. ATCPC also reveals the great potential of keyboard optimization to further enhance the performance of BCI spellers, which was hardly investigated before.

Designing a Motion-Onset Visual-Evoked Potential-Based Brain–Computer Interface to Control a Computer Game

Brain-computer interface (BCI) establishes an alternative direct communication channel between the brain and computer or other external devices. Motion-onset visual evoked potential (mVEP) related to the individual perception of movement is among synchronous BCI system that utilizes external stimulus. mVEPs stimulation paradigm is like an oddball stimulation paradigm. Researchers have recently been investigating mVEPs to control a computer game. To control a computer game, they used translation stimulus to evoke these potentials in EEG brain signals. In this study, we examine designing a computer game with four different types of stimuli, including translation, contraction, expansion, and rotation. We also used time-domain and wavelet coefficients for the feature extraction. Also, we used different types of linear discriminant analysis (LDA) classification methods, including least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), stepwise LDA (SWLDA); moreover, and spatial-temporal discriminant analysis (STDA) for detecting the target stimulus. Our results demonstrate that contraction, expansion, and rotation stimuli, as well as translation, could be employed to control a BCI game. Our results showed that subjects got higher scores, game accuracy control, and information transfer rate using the rotation stimulus with SWLDA/STDA classification methods.

Control of a Robotic Arm With an Optimized Common Template-Based CCA Method for SSVEP-Based BCI.

Recently, the robotic arm control system based on a brain-computer interface (BCI) has been employed to help the disabilities to improve their interaction abilities without body movement. However, it's the main challenge to implement the desired task by a robotic arm in a three-dimensional (3D) space because of the instability of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals and the interference by the spontaneous EEG activities. Moreover, the free motion control of a manipulator in 3D space is a complicated operation that requires more output commands and higher accuracy for brain activity recognition. Based on the above, a steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based synchronous BCI system with six stimulus targets was designed to realize the motion control function of the seven degrees of freedom (7-DOF) robotic arm. Meanwhile, a novel template-based method, which builds the optimized common templates (OCTs) from various subjects and learns spatial filters from the common templates and the multichannel EEG signal, was applied to enhance the SSVEP recognition accuracy, called OCT-based canonical correlation analysis (OCT-CCA). The comparison results of offline experimental based on a public benchmark dataset indicated that the proposed OCT-CCA method achieved significant improvement of detection accuracy in contrast to CCA and individual template-based CCA (IT-CCA), especially using a short data length. In the end, online experiments with five healthy subjects were implemented for achieving the manipulator real-time control system. The results showed that all five subjects can accomplish the tasks of controlling the manipulator to reach the designated position in the 3D space independently.

A high-performance brain switch based on code-modulated visual evoked potentials

Objective. Asynchronous brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are more practical and natural compared to synchronous BCIs. A brain switch is a standard asynchronous BCI, which can automatically detect the specified change of the brain and discriminate between the control state and the idle state. The current brain switches still face challenges on relatively long reaction time (RT) and high false positive rate (FPR). Approach. In this paper, an online electroencephalography-based brain switch is designed to realize a fast reaction and keep long idle time (IDLE) without false positives (FPs) using code-modulated visual evoked potentials (c-VEPs). Two stimulation paradigms were designed and compared in the experiments: multi-code concatenate modulation (concatenation mode) and single-code periodic modulation (periodic mode). Using a task-related component analysis-based detection algorithm, EEG data can be decoded into a series of code indices. Brain states can be detected by a template matching approach with a sliding window on the output series. Main results. The online experiments achieved an average RT of 1.49 s when the average IDLE for each FP was 68.57 min (1.46 × 10−2 FP min−1) or an average RT of 1.67 s without FPs. Significance. This study provides a practical c-VEP based brain switch system with both fast reaction and low FPR during idle state, which can be used in various BCI applications.

Spatio-temporal equalization multi-window algorithm for asynchronous SSVEP-based BCI

Objective. Asynchronous brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) show significant advantages in many practical application scenarios. Compared with the rapid development of synchronous BCIs technology, the progress of asynchronous BCI research, in terms of containing multiple targets and training-free detection, is still relatively slow. In order to improve the practicability of the BCI, a spatio-temporal equalization multi-window algorithm (STE-MW) was proposed for asynchronous detection of steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) without the need for acquiring calibration data. Approach. The algorithm used SIE strategy to intercept EEG signals of different lengths through multiple stacked time windows and statistical decisions-making based on Bayesian risk decision-making. Different from the traditional asynchronous algorithms based on the ‘non-control state detection’ methods, this algorithm was based on the ‘statistical inspection-rejection decision’ mode and did not require a separate classification of non-control states, so it can be effectively applied to detections for large-scale candidates. Main results. Online experimental results involving 14 healthy subjects showed that, in the continuously input experiments of 40 targets, the algorithm achieved the average recognition accuracy of and the average information transfer rate (ITR) of . At the same time, the average false alarm rate in the 240 s resting state test was . In the free spelling experiments involving patients with severe amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the subjects achieved an accuracy of 92.7% and an average ITR of 43.65 bits min−1 in two free spelling experiments. Significance. This algorithm can achieve high-performance, high-precision, and asynchronous detection of SSVEP signals with low algorithm complexity and false alarm rate under multi-targets and training-free conditions, which is helpful for the development of asynchronous BCI systems.

Brain-Switches for Asynchronous Brain–Computer Interfaces: A Systematic Review

A brain–computer interface (BCI) has been extensively studied to develop a novel communication system for disabled people using their brain activities. An asynchronous BCI system is more realistic and practical than a synchronous BCI system, in that, BCI commands can be generated whenever the user wants. However, the relatively low performance of an asynchronous BCI system is problematic because redundant BCI commands are required to correct false-positive operations. To significantly reduce the number of false-positive operations of an asynchronous BCI system, a two-step approach has been proposed using a brain-switch that first determines whether the user wants to use an asynchronous BCI system before the operation of the asynchronous BCI system. This study presents a systematic review of the state-of-the-art brain-switch techniques and future research directions. To this end, we reviewed brain-switch research articles published from 2000 to 2019 in terms of their (a) neuroimaging modality, (b) paradigm, (c) operation algorithm, and (d) performance.

Development of a Brain-Computer Interface Toggle Switch with Low False-Positive Rate Using Respiration-Modulated Photoplethysmography.

Asynchronous brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) based on electroencephalography (EEG) generally suffer from poor performance in terms of classification accuracy and false-positive rate (FPR). Thus, BCI toggle switches based on electrooculogram (EOG) signals were developed to toggle on/off synchronous BCI systems. The conventional BCI toggle switches exhibit fast responses with high accuracy; however, they have a high FPR or cannot be applied to patients with oculomotor impairments. To circumvent these issues, we developed a novel BCI toggle switch that users can employ to toggle on or off synchronous BCIs by holding their breath for a few seconds. Two states—normal breath and breath holding—were classified using a linear discriminant analysis with features extracted from the respiration-modulated photoplethysmography (PPG) signals. A real-time BCI toggle switch was implemented with calibration data trained with only 1-min PPG data. We evaluated the performance of our PPG switch by combining it with a steady-state visual evoked potential-based BCI system that was designed to control four external devices, with regard to the true-positive rate and FPR. The parameters of the PPG switch were optimized through an offline experiment with five subjects, and the performance of the switch system was evaluated in an online experiment with seven subjects. All the participants successfully turned on the BCI by holding their breath for approximately 10 s (100% accuracy), and the switch system exhibited a very low FPR of 0.02 false operations per minute, which is the lowest FPR reported thus far. All participants could successfully control external devices in the synchronous BCI mode. Our results demonstrated that the proposed PPG-based BCI toggle switch can be used to implement practical BCIs.

Asynchronous brain-computer interface shared control of robotic grasping

The control of a high Degree of Freedom (DoF) robot to grasp a target in three-dimensional space using Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) remains a very difficult problem to solve. Design of synchronous BCI requires the user perform the brain activity task all the time according to the predefined paradigm; such a process is boring and fatiguing. Furthermore, the strategy of switching between robotic auto-control and BCI control is not very reliable because the accuracy of Motor Imagery (MI) pattern recognition rarely reaches 100 % . In this paper, an asynchronous BCI shared control method is proposed for the high DoF robotic grasping task. The proposed method combines BCI control and automatic robotic control to simultaneously consider the robotic vision feedback and revise the unreasonable control commands. The user can easily mentally control the system and is only required to intervene and send brain commands to the automatic control system at the appropriate time according to the experience of the user. Two experiments are designed to validate our method: one aims to illustrate the accuracy of MI pattern recognition of our asynchronous BCI system; the other is the online practical experiment that controls the robot to grasp a target while avoiding an obstacle using the asynchronous BCI shared control method that can improve the safety and robustness of our system.

Nonfatigating Brain–Computer Interface Based on SSVEP and ERD to Command an Autonomous Car

This work describes the development of a nonfatigating Brain–Computer Interface (BCI) based on Steady State Evoked Potentials (SSVEP) and Event-Related Desynchronization (ERD) to control an autonomous car. Through a graphical interface presented to the user in the autonomous car, destination places are shown. The selection of commands is performed through visual stimuli and brain signals. The signals are captured on the occipital region of the scalp, and are processed in order to obtain the necessary data for the planning system of the autonomous car. Test performed obtained success rate of 90% for a synchronous BCI and 83% for an asynchronous BCI. The proposed system is a hybrid-BCI, which includes the ability to enable and disable the visual stimuli, reducing fatigue associated with the use of SSVEP-based BCIs. The video showing this development can be accessed on: cbeb2020.org/AutonomousCarVideo.mp4.

Using ELM-based weighted probabilistic model in the classification of synchronous EEG BCI.

Extreme learning machine (ELM) is an effective machine learning technique with simple theory and fast implementation, which has gained increasing interest from various research fields recently. A new method that combines ELM with probabilistic model method is proposed in this paper to classify the electroencephalography (EEG) signals in synchronous brain-computer interface (BCI) system. In the proposed method, the softmax function is used to convert the ELM output to classification probability. The Chernoff error bound, deduced from the Bayesian probabilistic model in the training process, is adopted as the weight to take the discriminant process. Since the proposed method makes use of the knowledge from all preceding training datasets, its discriminating performance improves accumulatively. In the test experiments based on the datasets from BCI competitions, the proposed method is compared with other classification methods, including the linear discriminant analysis, support vector machine, ELM and weighted probabilistic model methods. For comparison, the mutual information, classification accuracy and information transfer rate are considered as the evaluation indicators for these classifiers. The results demonstrate that our method shows competitive performance against other methods.

User-customized brain computer interfaces using Bayesian optimization

Objective. The brain characteristics of different people are not the same. Brain computer interfaces (BCIs) should thus be customized for each individual person. In motor-imagery based synchronous BCIs, a number of parameters (referred to as hyper-parameters) including the EEG frequency bands, the channels and the time intervals from which the features are extracted should be pre-determined based on each subject’s brain characteristics. Approach. To determine the hyper-parameter values, previous work has relied on manual or semi-automatic methods that are not applicable to high-dimensional search spaces. In this paper, we propose a fully automatic, scalable and computationally inexpensive algorithm that uses Bayesian optimization to tune these hyper-parameters. We then build different classifiers trained on the sets of hyper-parameter values proposed by the Bayesian optimization. A final classifier aggregates the results of the different classifiers. Main Results. We have applied our method to 21 subjects from three BCI competition datasets. We have conducted rigorous statistical tests, and have shown the positive impact of hyper-parameter optimization in improving the accuracy of BCIs. Furthermore, We have compared our results to those reported in the literature. Significance. Unlike the best reported results in the literature, which are based on more sophisticated feature extraction and classification methods, and rely on prestudies to determine the hyper-parameter values, our method has the advantage of being fully automated, uses less sophisticated feature extraction and classification methods, and yields similar or superior results compared to the best performing designs in the literature.

Comparing Different Classifiers in Sensory Motor Brain Computer Interfaces.

A problem that impedes the progress in Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) research is the difficulty in reproducing the results of different papers. Comparing different algorithms at present is very difficult. Some improvements have been made by the use of standard datasets to evaluate different algorithms. However, the lack of a comparison framework still exists. In this paper, we construct a new general comparison framework to compare different algorithms on several standard datasets. All these datasets correspond to sensory motor BCIs, and are obtained from 21 subjects during their operation of synchronous BCIs and 8 subjects using self-paced BCIs. Other researchers can use our framework to compare their own algorithms on their own datasets. We have compared the performance of different popular classification algorithms over these 29 subjects and performed statistical tests to validate our results. Our findings suggest that, for a given subject, the choice of the classifier for a BCI system depends on the feature extraction method used in that BCI system. This is in contrary to most of publications in the field that have used Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) as the classifier of choice for BCI systems.

Toward a Semi-Self-Paced EEG Brain Computer Interface: Decoding Initiation State from Non-Initiation State in Dedicated Time Slots

Brain computer interfaces (BCIs) offer a broad class of neurologically impaired individuals an alternative means to interact with the environment. Many BCIs are “synchronous” systems, in which the system sets the timing of the interaction and tries to infer what control command the subject is issuing at each prompting. In contrast, in “asynchronous” BCIs subjects pace the interaction and the system must determine when the subject’s control command occurs. In this paper we propose a new idea for BCI which draws upon the strengths of both approaches. The subjects are externally paced and the BCI is able to determine when control commands are issued by decoding the subject’s intention for initiating control in dedicated time slots. A single task with randomly interleaved trials was designed to test whether it can be used as stimulus for inducing initiation and non-initiation states when the sensory and motor requirements for the two types of trials are very nearly identical. Further, the essential problem on the discrimination between initiation state and non-initiation state was studied. We tested the ability of EEG spectral power to distinguish between these two states. Among the four standard EEG frequency bands, beta band power recorded over parietal-occipital cortices provided the best performance, achieving an average accuracy of 86% for the correct classification of initiation and non-initiation states. Moreover, delta band power recorded over parietal and motor areas yielded a good performance and thus could also be used as an alternative feature to discriminate these two mental states. The results demonstrate the viability of our proposed idea for a BCI design based on conventional EEG features. Our proposal offers the potential to mitigate the signal detection challenges of fully asynchronous BCIs, while providing greater flexibility to the subject than traditional synchronous BCIs.

A novel steady-state visually evoked potential-based brain–computer interface design: Character Plotter

In this paper, an electroencephalogram-based innovative brain–computer interface (BCI), known as “Character Plotter”, is presented. The proposed design uses steady-state visually evoked potentials. The subjects generate characters by drawing, step by step, lines between six circles on the computer screen. Additionally, there are three circles for controlling the drawing procedure. The features obtained from canonical correlation analysis are used for classification. The proposed synchronous BCI design was tested on 16 subjects in offline and online experimental tasks using support vector machines, linear discriminant analysis and the nearest mean classifier. The obtained classification performances indicate that the proposed design can be successfully used in classification. The Character Plotter converges to the natural writing scheme of humans. Therefore, subjects can adapt to the BCI design in a short training session.

An Improved Stimuli System for Brain-Computer Interface Applications

When developing a motion synchronous Brain-Computer Interface, it is very important to have effective stimuli. This research tests and proposes an improved brain computer interface stimulus system, based on event related spectral perturbation. In order to investigate the reaction of the motor cortex to stimuli, the influence of the human senses has to be investigated. Considering the limitations of human senses, the article proposes effective visual and auditory stimuli in two similar tasks, to gain accuracy and better reaction time (RT) for real movements in Brain-Computer Interface synchronous systems.