Sparse Bayesian Classification of EEG for Brain-Computer Interface

Periodic Visual Stimulation Induces Resting-State Brain Network Reconfiguration

Periodic visual stimulation can evoke the steady-state visual potential (SSVEP) in the brain. Owing to its superior characteristics, the SSVEP has been widely used in neural engineering and cognitive neuroscience studies. However, the underlying mechanisms of the SSVEP are not well understood. In this study, we introduced a brain reconfiguration methodology to explore the possible mechanisms of the SSVEP. The EEG data from five periodic stimuli consistently indicated that the periodic visual stimulation could induce resting-state brain network reconfiguration and that the responses evoked by the stimuli were correlated to the network reconfiguration indexes. For each stimulus frequency, larger response amplitudes corresponded to higher reconfiguration indexes from the resting-state network to a stimulus-evoked network. These findings demonstrate that an external periodic visual stimulation can induce the modification of intrinsic oscillatory activities by reconfiguring resting-state activity at a network level, which could facilitate the responses evoked by the stimulus. These findings provide new insights into the response mechanisms of periodic visual stimulation.

A new parameter tuning approach for enhanced motor imagery EEG signal classification

A brain-computer interface (BCI) system allows direct communication between the brain and the external world. Common spatial pattern (CSP) has been used effectively for feature extraction of data used in BCI systems. However, many studies show that the performance of a BCI system using CSP largely depends on the filter parameters. The filter parameters that yield most discriminating information vary from subject to subject and manually tuning of the filter parameters is a difficult and time-consuming exercise. In this paper, we propose a new automated filter tuning approach for motor imagery electroencephalography (EEG) signal classification, which automatically and flexibly finds the filter parameters for optimal performance. We have evaluated the performance of our proposed method on two public benchmark datasets. Compared to the existing conventional CSP approach, our method reduces the average classification error rate by 2.89% and 3.61% for BCI Competition III dataset IVa and BCI Competition IV dataset I, respectively. Moreover, our proposed approach also achieved lowest average classification error rate compared to state-of-the-art methods studied in this paper. Thus, our proposed method can be potentially used for developing improved BCI systems, which can assist people with disabilities to recover their environmental control. It can also be used for enhanced disease recognition such as epileptic seizure detection using EEG signals. Graphical abstract ᅟ.

Constructing Multi-frequency High-Order Functional Connectivity Network for Diagnosis of Mild Cognitive Impairment

Human brain functional connectivity (FC) networks, estimated based on resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI), has become a promising tool for imaging-based brain disease diagnosis. Conventional low-order FC network (LON) usually characterizes pairwise temporal correlation of rs-fMRI signals between any pair of brain regions. Meanwhile, high-order FC network (HON) has provided an alternative brain network modeling strategy, characterizing more complex interactions among low-order FC sub-networks that involve multiple brain regions. However, both LON and HON are usually constructed within a fixed and relatively wide frequency band, which may fail in capturing (sensitive) frequency-specific FC changes caused by pathological attacks. To address this issue, we propose a novel "multi-frequency HON construction" method. Specifically, we construct not only multiple frequency-specific HONs (intra-spectrum HONs), but also a series of cross-frequency interaction-based HONs (inter-spectrum HONs) based on the low-order FC sub-networks constructed at different frequency bands. Both types of these HONs, together with the frequency-specific LONs, are used for the complex network analysis-based feature extraction, followed by sparse regression-based feature selection and the classification between mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients and normal aging subjects using a support vector machine. Compared with the previous methods, our proposed method achieves the best diagnosis accuracy in early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.

Inter-subject Similarity Guided Brain Network Modeling for MCI Diagnosis

Sparse representation-based brain network modeling, although popular, often results in relatively large inter-subject variability in network structures. This inevitably makes it difficult for inter-subject comparison, thus eventually deteriorating the generalization capability of personalized disease diagnosis. Accordingly, group sparse representation has been proposed to alleviate such limitation by jointly estimating connectivity weights for all subjects. However, the constructed brain networks based on this method often fail in providing satisfactory separability between the subjects from different groups (e.g., patients vs. normal controls), which will also affect the performance of computer-aided disease diagnosis. Based on the hypothesis that subjects from the same group should have larger similarity in their functional connectivity (FC) patterns than subjects from other groups, we propose an "inter-subject FC similarity-guided" group sparse network modeling method. In this method, we explicitly include the inter-subject FC similarity as a constraint to conduct group-wise FC network modeling, while retaining sufficient between-group differences in the resultant FC networks. This improves the separability of brain functional networks between different groups, thus facilitating better personalized brain disease diagnosis. Specifically, the inter-subject FC similarity is roughly estimated by comparing the Pearson's correlation based FC patterns of each brain region to other regions for each pair of the subjects. Then, this is implemented as an additional weighting term to ensure the adequate inter-subject FC differences between the subjects from different groups. Of note, our method retains the group sparsity constraint to ensure the overall consistency of the resultant individual brain networks. Experimental results show that our method achieves a balanced trade-off by not only generating the individually consistent FC networks, but also effectively maintaining the necessary group difference, thereby significantly improving connectomics-based diagnosis for mild cognitive impairment (MCI).

Index finger motor imagery EEG pattern recognition in BCI applications using dictionary cleaned sparse representation-based classification for healthy people

Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based motor imagery (MI) brain-computer interface (BCI) has shown its effectiveness for the control of rehabilitation devices designed for large body parts of the patients with neurologic impairments. In order to validate the feasibility of using EEG to decode the MI of a single index finger and constructing a BCI-enhanced finger rehabilitation system, we collected EEG data during right hand index finger MI and rest state for five healthy subjects and proposed a pattern recognition approach for classifying these two mental states. First, Fisher's linear discriminant criteria and power spectral density analysis were used to analyze the event-related desynchronization patterns. Second, both band power and approximate entropy were extracted as features. Third, aiming to eliminate the abnormal samples in the dictionary and improve the classification performance of the conventional sparse representation-based classification (SRC) method, we proposed a novel dictionary cleaned sparse representation-based classification (DCSRC) method for final classification. The experimental results show that the proposed DCSRC method gives better classification accuracies than SRC and an average classification accuracy of 81.32% is obtained for five subjects. Thus, it is demonstrated that single right hand index finger MI can be decoded from the sensorimotor rhythms, and the feature patterns of index finger MI and rest state can be well recognized for robotic exoskeleton initiation.

A Novel Multilayer Correlation Maximization Model for Improving CCA-Based Frequency Recognition in SSVEP Brain-Computer Interface

Multiset canonical correlation analysis (MsetCCA) has been successfully applied to optimize the reference signals by extracting common features from multiple sets of electroencephalogram (EEG) for steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) recognition in brain-computer interface application. To avoid extracting the possible noise components as common features, this study proposes a sophisticated extension of MsetCCA, called multilayer correlation maximization (MCM) model for further improving SSVEP recognition accuracy. MCM combines advantages of both CCA and MsetCCA by carrying out three layers of correlation maximization processes. The first layer is to extract the stimulus frequency-related information in using CCA between EEG samples and sine-cosine reference signals. The second layer is to learn reference signals by extracting the common features with MsetCCA. The third layer is to re-optimize the reference signals set in using CCA with sine-cosine reference signals again. Experimental study is implemented to validate effectiveness of the proposed MCM model in comparison with the standard CCA and MsetCCA algorithms. Superior performance of MCM demonstrates its promising potential for the development of an improved SSVEP-based brain-computer interface.

Hybrid High-order Functional Connectivity Networks Using Resting-state Functional MRI for Mild Cognitive Impairment Diagnosis

Conventional functional connectivity (FC), referred to as low-order FC, estimates temporal correlation of the resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) time series between any pair of brain regions, simply ignoring the potentially high-level relationship among these brain regions. A high-order FC based on “correlation’s correlation” has emerged as a new approach for abnormality detection of brain disease. However, separate construction of the low- and high-order FC networks overlooks information exchange between the two FC levels. Such a higher-level relationship could be more important for brain diseases study. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, namely “hybrid high-order FC networks” by exploiting the higher-level dynamic interaction among brain regions for early mild cognitive impairment (eMCI) diagnosis. For each sliding window-based rs-fMRI sub-series, we construct a whole-brain associated high-order network, by estimating the correlations between the topographical information of the high-order FC sub-network from one brain region and that of the low-order FC sub-network from another brain region. With multi-kernel learning, complementary features from multiple time-varying FC networks constructed at different levels are fused for eMCI classification. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods, the proposed framework achieves superior diagnosis accuracy, and hence could be promising for understanding pathological changes of brain connectome.

Hybrid Brain-Computer Interface Techniques for Improved Classification Accuracy and Increased Number of Commands: A Review

In this article, non-invasive hybrid brain-computer interface (hBCI) technologies for improving classification accuracy and increasing the number of commands are reviewed. Hybridization combining more than two modalities is a new trend in brain imaging and prosthesis control. Electroencephalography (EEG), due to its easy use and fast temporal resolution, is most widely utilized in combination with other brain/non-brain signal acquisition modalities, for instance, functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), electromyography (EMG), electrooculography (EOG), and eye tracker. Three main purposes of hybridization are to increase the number of control commands, improve classification accuracy and reduce the signal detection time. Currently, such combinations of EEG + fNIRS and EEG + EOG are most commonly employed. Four principal components (i.e., hardware, paradigm, classifiers, and features) relevant to accuracy improvement are discussed. In the case of brain signals, motor imagination/movement tasks are combined with cognitive tasks to increase active brain-computer interface (BCI) accuracy. Active and reactive tasks sometimes are combined: motor imagination with steady-state evoked visual potentials (SSVEP) and motor imagination with P300. In the case of reactive tasks, SSVEP is most widely combined with P300 to increase the number of commands. Passive BCIs, however, are rare. After discussing the hardware and strategies involved in the development of hBCI, the second part examines the approaches used to increase the number of control commands and to enhance classification accuracy. The future prospects and the extension of hBCI in real-time applications for daily life scenarios are provided.

Learning-based structurally-guided construction of resting-state functional correlation tensors

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures changes in blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) signals to detect brain activities. It has been recently reported that the spatial correlation patterns of resting-state BOLD signals in the white matter (WM) also give WM information often measured by diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). These correlation patterns can be captured using functional correlation tensor (FCT), which is analogous to the diffusion tensor (DT) obtained from DTI. In this paper, we propose a noise-robust FCT method aiming at further improving its quality, and making it eligible for further neuroscience study. The novel FCT estimation method consists of three major steps: First, we estimate the initial FCT using a patch-based approach for BOLD signal correlation to improve the noise robustness. Second, by utilizing the relationship between functional and diffusion data, we employ a regression forest model to learn the mapping between the initial FCTs and the corresponding DTs using the training data. The learned forest can then be applied to predict the DTI-like tensors given the initial FCTs from the testing fMRI data. Third, we re-estimate the enhanced FCT by utilizing the DTI-like tensors as a feedback guidance to further improve FCT computation. We have demonstrated the utility of our enhanced FCTs in Alzheimer's disease (AD) diagnosis by identifying mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients from normal subjects.

An emergency call system for patients in locked-in state using an SSVEP-based brain switch

Patients in a locked-in state (LIS) due to severe neurological disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) require seamless emergency care by their caregivers or guardians. However, it is a difficult job for the guardians to continuously monitor the patients' state, especially when direct communication is not possible. In the present study, we developed an emergency call system for such patients using a steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based brain switch. Although there have been previous studies to implement SSVEP-based brain switch system, they have not been applied to patients in LIS, and thus their clinical value has not been validated. In this study, we verified whether the SSVEP-based brain switch system can be practically used as an emergency call system for patients in LIS. The brain switch used for our system adopted a chromatic visual stimulus, which proved to be visually less stimulating than conventional checkerboard-type stimuli but could generate SSVEP responses strong enough to be used for brain-computer interface (BCI) applications. To verify the feasibility of our emergency call system, 14 healthy participants and 3 patients with severe ALS took part in online experiments. All three ALS patients successfully called their guardians to their bedsides in about 6.56 seconds. Furthermore, additional experiments with one of these patients demonstrated that our emergency call system maintains fairly good performance even up to 4 weeks after the first experiment without renewing initial calibration data. Our results suggest that our SSVEP-based emergency call system might be successfully used in practical scenarios.

Hierarchical High-Order Functional Connectivity Networks and Selective Feature Fusion for MCI Classification

Conventional Functional connectivity (FC) analysis focuses on characterizing the correlation between two brain regions, whereas the high-order FC can model the correlation between two brain region pairs. To reduce the number of brain region pairs, clustering is applied to group all the brain region pairs into a small number of clusters. Then, a high-order FC network can be constructed based on the clustering result. By varying the number of clusters, multiple high-order FC networks can be generated and the one with the best overall performance can be finally selected. However, the important information contained in other networks may be simply discarded. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose to make full use of the information contained in all high-order FC networks. First, an agglomerative hierarchical clustering technique is applied such that the clustering result in one layer always depends on the previous layer, thus making the high-order FC networks in the two consecutive layers highly correlated. As a result, the features extracted from high-order FC network in each layer can be decomposed into two parts (blocks), i.e., one is redundant while the other might be informative or complementary, with respect to its previous layer. Then, a selective feature fusion method, which combines sequential forward selection and sparse regression, is developed to select a feature set from those informative feature blocks for classification. Experimental results confirm that our novel method outperforms the best single high-order FC network in diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) subjects.

Extraction of dynamic functional connectivity from brain grey matter and white matter for MCI classification

Brain functional connectivity (FC) extracted from resting-state fMRI (RS-fMRI) has become a popular approach for diagnosing various neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease (AD) and its prodromal stage, mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Current studies mainly construct the FC networks between grey matter (GM) regions of the brain based on temporal co-variations of the blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signals, which reflects the synchronized neural activities. However, it was rarely investigated whether the FC detected within the white matter (WM) could provide useful information for diagnosis. Motivated by the recently proposed functional correlation tensors (FCT) computed from RS-fMRI and used to characterize the structured pattern of local FC in the WM, we propose in this article a novel MCI classification method based on the information conveyed by both the FC between the GM regions and that within the WM regions. Specifically, in the WM, the tensor-based metrics (e.g., fractional anisotropy [FA], similar to the metric calculated based on diffusion tensor imaging [DTI]) are first calculated based on the FCT and then summarized along each of the major WM fiber tracts connecting each pair of the brain GM regions. This could capture the functional information in the WM, in a similar network structure as the FC network constructed for the GM, based only on the same RS-fMRI data. Moreover, a sliding window approach is further used to partition the voxel-wise BOLD signal into multiple short overlapping segments. Then, both the FC and FCT between each pair of the brain regions can be calculated based on the BOLD signal segments in the GM and WM, respectively. In such a way, our method can generate dynamic FC and dynamic FCT to better capture functional information in both GM and WM and further integrate them together by using our developed feature extraction, selection, and ensemble learning algorithms. The experimental results verify that the dynamic FCT can provide valuable functional information in the WM; by combining it with the dynamic FC in the GM, the diagnosis accuracy for MCI subjects can be significantly improved even using RS-fMRI data alone. Hum Brain Mapp 38:5019-5034, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Multi-task diagnosis for autism spectrum disorders using multi-modality features: A multi-center study

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopment disease characterized by impairment of social interaction, language, behavior, and cognitive functions. Up to now, many imaging-based methods for ASD diagnosis have been developed. For example, one may extract abundant features from multi-modality images and then derive a discriminant function to map the selected features toward the disease label. A lot of recent works, however, are limited to single imaging centers. To this end, we propose a novel multi-modality multi-center classification (M3CC) method for ASD diagnosis. We treat the classification of each imaging center as one task. By introducing the task-task and modality-modality regularizations, we solve the classification for all imaging centers simultaneously. Meanwhile, the optimal feature selection and the modeling of the discriminant functions can be jointly conducted for highly accurate diagnosis. Besides, we also present an efficient iterative optimization solution to our formulated problem and further investigate its convergence. Our comprehensive experiments on the ABIDE database show that our proposed method can significantly improve the performance of ASD diagnosis, compared to the existing methods. Hum Brain Mapp 38:3081-3097, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Toward a hybrid brain-computer interface based on repetitive visual stimuli with missing events

Background

Steady-state visually evoked potentials (SSVEPs) can be elicited by repetitive stimuli and extracted in the frequency domain with satisfied performance. However, the temporal information of such stimulus is often ignored. In this study, we utilized repetitive visual stimuli with missing events to present a novel hybrid BCI paradigm based on SSVEP and omitted stimulus potential (OSP).

Methods

Four discs flickering from black to white with missing flickers served as visual stimulators to simultaneously elicit subject’s SSVEPs and OSPs. Key parameters in the new paradigm, including flicker frequency, optimal electrodes, missing flicker duration and intervals of missing events were qualitatively discussed with offline data. Two omitted flicker patterns including missing black/white disc were proposed and compared. Averaging times were optimized with Information Transfer Rate (ITR) in online experiments, where SSVEPs and OSPs were identified using Canonical Correlation Analysis in the frequency domain and Support Vector Machine (SVM)-Bayes fusion in the time domain, respectively.

Results and conclusions

The online accuracy and ITR (mean ± standard deviation) over nine healthy subjects were 79.29 ± 18.14 % and 19.45 ± 11.99 bits/min with missing black disc pattern, and 86.82 ± 12.91 % and 24.06 ± 10.95 bits/min with missing white disc pattern, respectively. The proposed BCI paradigm, for the first time, demonstrated that SSVEPs and OSPs can be simultaneously elicited in single visual stimulus pattern and recognized in real-time with satisfied performance. Besides the frequency features such as SSVEP elicited by repetitive stimuli, we found a new feature (OSP) in the time domain to design a novel hybrid BCI paradigm by adding missing events in repetitive stimuli.

Discriminative Feature Extraction via Multivariate Linear Regression for SSVEP-Based BCI

Many of the most widely accepted methods for reliable detection of steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) in the electroencephalogram (EEG) utilize canonical correlation analysis (CCA). CCA uses pure sine and cosine reference templates with frequencies corresponding to the visual stimulation frequencies. These generic reference templates may not optimally reflect the natural SSVEP features obscured by the background EEG. This paper introduces a new approach that utilizes spatio-temporal feature extraction with multivariate linear regression (MLR) to learn discriminative SSVEP features for improving the detection accuracy. MLR is implemented on dimensionality-reduced EEG training data and a constructed label matrix to find optimally discriminative subspaces. Experimental results show that the proposed MLR method significantly outperforms CCA as well as several other competing methods for SSVEP detection, especially for time windows shorter than 1 second. This demonstrates that the MLR method is a promising new approach for achieving improved real-time performance of SSVEP-BCIs.

Optimizing spatial patterns with sparse filter bands for motor-imagery based brain-computer interface

BACKGROUND

Common spatial pattern (CSP) has been most popularly applied to motor-imagery (MI) feature extraction for classification in brain-computer interface (BCI) application. Successful application of CSP depends on the filter band selection to a large degree. However, the most proper band is typically subject-specific and can hardly be determined manually.

NEW METHOD

This study proposes a sparse filter band common spatial pattern (SFBCSP) for optimizing the spatial patterns. SFBCSP estimates CSP features on multiple signals that are filtered from raw EEG data at a set of overlapping bands. The filter bands that result in significant CSP features are then selected in a supervised way by exploiting sparse regression. A support vector machine (SVM) is implemented on the selected features for MI classification.

RESULTS

Two public EEG datasets (BCI Competition III dataset IVa and BCI Competition IV IIb) are used to validate the proposed SFBCSP method. Experimental results demonstrate that SFBCSP help improve the classification performance of MI.

COMPARISON WITH EXISTING METHODS

The optimized spatial patterns by SFBCSP give overall better MI classification accuracy in comparison with several competing methods.

CONCLUSIONS

The proposed SFBCSP is a potential method for improving the performance of MI-based BCI.