A Calibration-free Approach to Implementing P300-based Brain–computer Interface

Subject-Independent Wearable P300 Brain-Computer Interface Based on Convolutional Neural Network and Metric Learning

The calibration procedure for a wearable P300 brain-computer interface (BCI) greatly impact the user experience of the system. Each user needs to spend additional time establishing a decoder adapted to their own brainwaves. Therefore, achieving subject independent is an urgent issue for wearable P300 BCI needs to be addressed. A dataset of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals was constructed from 100 individuals by conducting a P300 speller task with a wearable EEG amplifier. A framework is proposed that initially improves cross- subject consistency of EEG features through a common feature extractor. Subsequently, a simple and compact convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture is employed to learn an embedding sub-space, where the mapped EEG features are maximally separated, while pursuing the minimum distance within the same class and the maximum distance between different classes. Finally, the model's generalization capability was further optimized through fine-tuning. Results: The proposed method significantly boosts the average accuracy of wearable P300 BCI to 73.23±7.62 % without calibration and 78.75±6.37 % with fine-tuning. The results demonstrate the feasibility and excellent performance of our dataset and framework. A calibration-free wearable P300 BCI system is feasible, suggesting significant potential for practical applications of the wearable P300 BCI system.

EEGNet-based multi-source domain filter for BCI transfer learning

Deep learning has great potential on decoding EEG in brain-computer interface. While common deep learning algorithms cannot directly train models with data from multiple individuals because of the inter-individual differences in EEG. Collecting enough data for each subject to satisfy the training of deep learning would result in an increase in training cost. This study proposes a novel transfer learning, EEGNet-based multi-source domain filter for transfer learning (EEGNet-MDFTL), to reduce the amount of training data and improve the performance of BCI. The EEGNet-MDFTL uses bagging ensemble learning to learn domain-invariant features from the multi-source domain and utilizes model loss value to filter the multi-source domain. Compared with baseline methods, the accuracy of the EEGNet-MDFTL reaches 91.96%, higher than two state-of-the-art methods, which demonstrates source domain filter can select similar source domains to improve the accuracy of the model, and remains a high level even when the data amount is reduced to 1/8, proving that ensemble learning learns enough domain invariant features from the multi-source domain to make the model insensitive to data amount. The proposed EEGNet-MDFTL is effective in improving the decoding performance with a small amount of data, which is helpful to save the BCI training cost.

Single-trial P300 classification algorithm based on centralized multi-person data fusion CNN

Introduction

Currently, it is still a challenge to detect single-trial P300 from electroencephalography (EEG) signals. In this paper, to address the typical problems faced by existing single-trial P300 classification, such as complex, time-consuming and low accuracy processes, a single-trial P300 classification algorithm based on multiplayer data fusion convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed to construct a centralized collaborative brain-computer interfaces (cBCI) for fast and highly accurate classification of P300 EEG signals.

Methods

In this paper, two multi-person data fusion methods (parallel data fusion and serial data fusion) are used in the data pre-processing stage to fuse multi-person EEG information stimulated by the same task instructions, and then the fused data is fed as input to the CNN for classification. In building the CNN network for single-trial P300 classification, the Conv layer was first used to extract the features of single-trial P300, and then the Maxpooling layer was used to connect the Flatten layer for secondary feature extraction and dimensionality reduction, thereby simplifying the computation. Finally batch normalisation is used to train small batches of data in order to better generalize the network and speed up single-trial P300 signal classification.

Results

In this paper, the above new algorithms were tested on the Kaggle dataset and the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) Competition III dataset, and by analyzing the P300 waveform features and EEG topography and the four standard evaluation metrics, namely Accuracy, Precision, Recall and F1-score,it was demonstrated that the single-trial P300 classification algorithm after two multi-person data fusion CNNs significantly outperformed other classification algorithms.

Discussion

The results show that the single-trial P300 classification algorithm after two multi-person data fusion CNNs significantly outperformed the single-person model, and that the single-trial P300 classification algorithm with two multi-person data fusion CNNs involves smaller models, fewer training parameters, higher classification accuracy and improves the overall P300-cBCI classification rate and actual performance more effectively with a small amount of sample information compared to other algorithms.

Neural Decoders Using Reinforcement Learning in Brain Machine Interfaces: A Technical Review

Creating flexible and robust brain machine interfaces (BMIs) is currently a popular topic of research that has been explored for decades in medicine, engineering, commercial, and machine-learning communities. In particular, the use of techniques using reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated impressive results but is under-represented in the BMI community. To shine more light on this promising relationship, this article aims to provide an exhaustive review of RL's applications to BMIs. Our primary focus in this review is to provide a technical summary of various algorithms used in RL-based BMIs to decode neural intention, without emphasizing preprocessing techniques on the neural signals and reward modeling for RL. We first organize the literature based on the type of RL methods used for neural decoding, and then each algorithm's learning strategy is explained along with its application in BMIs. A comparative analysis highlighting the similarities and uniqueness among neural decoders is provided. Finally, we end this review with a discussion about the current stage of RLBMIs including their limitations and promising directions for future research.

A Regional Smoothing Block Sparse Bayesian Learning Method With Temporal Correlation for Channel Selection in P300 Speller

The P300-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) enable participants to communicate by decoding the electroencephalography (EEG) signal. Different regions of the brain correspond to various mental activities. Therefore, removing weak task-relevant and noisy channels through channel selection is necessary when decoding a specific type of activity from EEG. It can improve the recognition accuracy and reduce the training time of the subsequent models. This study proposes a novel block sparse Bayesian-based channel selection method for the P300 speller. In this method, we introduce block sparse Bayesian learning (BSBL) into the channel selection of P300 BCI for the first time and propose a regional smoothing BSBL (RSBSBL) by combining the spatial distribution properties of EEG. The RSBSBL can determine the number of channels adaptively. To ensure practicality, we design an automatic selection iteration strategy model to reduce the time cost caused by the inverse operation of the large-size matrix. We verified the proposed method on two public P300 datasets and on our collected datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed method can remove the inferior channels and work with the classifier to obtain high-classification accuracy. Hence, RSBSBL has tremendous potential for channel selection in P300 tasks.