A hybrid NIRS-EEG system for self-paced brain computer interface with online motor imagery.

BACKGROUND: For a self-paced motor imagery based brain-computer interface (BCI), the system should be able to recognize the occurrence of a motor imagery, as well as the type of the motor imagery. However, because of the difficulty of detecting the occurrence of a motor imagery, general motor imagery based BCI studies have been focusing on the cued motor imagery paradigm. NEW METHOD: In this paper, we present a novel hybrid BCI system that uses near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and electroencephalography (EEG) systems together to achieve online self-paced motor imagery based BCI. We designed a unique sensor frame that records NIRS and EEG simultaneously for the realization of our system. Based on this hybrid system, we proposed a novel analysis method that detects the occurrence of a motor imagery with the NIRS system, and classifies its type with the EEG system. RESULTS: An online experiment demonstrated that our hybrid system had a true positive rate of about 88%, a false positive rate of 7% with an average response time of 10.36 s. COMPARISON WITH EXISTING METHOD(S): As far as we know, there is no report that explored hemodynamic brain switch for self-paced motor imagery based BCI with hybrid EEG and NIRS system. CONCLUSIONS: From our experimental results, our hybrid system showed enough reliability for using in a practical self-paced motor imagery based BCI.

Bayesian common spatial patterns for multi-subject EEG classification.

Multi-subject electroencephalography (EEG) classification involves algorithm development for automatically categorizing brain waves measured from multiple subjects who undergo the same mental task. Common spatial patterns (CSP) or its probabilistic counterpart, PCSP, is a popular discriminative feature extraction method for EEG classification. Models in CSP or PCSP are trained on a subject-by-subject basis so that inter-subject information is neglected. In the case of multi-subject EEG classification, however, it is desirable to capture inter-subject relatedness in learning a model. In this paper we present a nonparametric Bayesian model for a multi-subject extension of PCSP where subject relatedness is captured by assuming that spatial patterns across subjects share a latent subspace. Spatial patterns and the shared latent subspace are jointly learned by variational inference. We use an infinite latent feature model to automatically infer the dimension of the shared latent subspace, placing Indian Buffet process (IBP) priors on our model. Numerical experiments on BCI competition III IVa and IV 2a dataset demonstrate the high performance of our method, compared to PCSP and existing Bayesian multi-task CSP models.