Explainable cross-task adaptive transfer learning for motor imagery EEG classification.

Objective. In the field of motor imagery (MI) electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces, deep transfer learning (TL) has proven to be an effective tool for solving the problem of limited availability in subject-specific data for the training of robust deep learning (DL) models. Although considerable progress has been made in the cross-subject/session and cross-device scenarios, the more challenging problem of cross-task deep TL remains largely unexplored.Approach. We propose a novel explainable cross-task adaptive TL method for MI EEG decoding. Firstly, similarity analysis and data alignment are performed for EEG data of motor execution (ME) and MI tasks. Afterwards, the MI EEG decoding model is obtained via pre-training with extensive ME EEG data and fine-tuning with partial MI EEG data. Finally, expected gradient-based post-hoc explainability analysis is conducted for the visualization of important temporal-spatial features.Main results. Extensive experiments are conducted on one large ME EEG High-Gamma dataset and two large MI EEG datasets (openBMI and GIST). The best average classification accuracy of our method reaches 80.00% and 72.73% for OpenBMI and GIST respectively, which outperforms several state-of-the-art algorithms. In addition, the results of the explainability analysis further validate the correlation between ME and MI EEG data and the effectiveness of ME/MI cross-task adaptation.Significance. This paper confirms that the decoding of MI EEG can be well facilitated by pre-existing ME EEG data, which largely relaxes the constraint of training samples for MI EEG decoding and is important in a practical sense.

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 spatial-frequency-temporal optimized feature sparse representation-based classification method for motor imagery EEG pattern recognition.

Effective feature extraction and classification methods are of great importance for motor imagery (MI)-based brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. The common spatial pattern (CSP) algorithm is a widely used feature extraction method for MI-based BCIs. In this work, we propose a novel spatial-frequency-temporal optimized feature sparse representation-based classification method. Optimal channels are selected based on relative entropy criteria. Significant CSP features on frequency-temporal domains are selected automatically to generate a column vector for sparse representation-based classification (SRC). We analyzed the performance of the new method on two public EEG datasets, namely BCI competition III dataset IVa which has five subjects and BCI competition IV dataset IIb which has nine subjects. Compared to the performance offered by the existing SRC method, the proposed method achieves average classification accuracy improvements of 21.568 and 14.38% for BCI competition III dataset IVa and BCI competition IV dataset IIb, respectively. Furthermore, our approach also shows better classification performance when compared to other competing methods for both datasets.