Research on phase modulation to enhance the feature of high-frequency steady-state asymmetric visual evoked potentials / 生物医学工程学杂志

High-frequency steady-state asymmetric visual evoked potential (SSaVEP) provides a new paradigm for designing comfortable and practical brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. However, due to the weak amplitude and strong noise of high-frequency signals, it is of great significance to study how to enhance their signal features. In this study, a 30 Hz high-frequency visual stimulus was used, and the peripheral visual field was equally divided into eight annular sectors. Eight kinds of annular sector pairs were selected based on the mapping relationship of visual space onto the primary visual cortex (V1), and three phases (in-phase[0º, 0º], anti-phase [0º, 180º], and anti-phase [180º, 0º]) were designed for each annular sector pair to explore response intensity and signal-to-noise ratio under phase modulation. A total of 8 healthy subjects were recruited in the experiment. The results showed that three annular sector pairs exhibited significant differences in SSaVEP features under phase modulation at 30 Hz high-frequency stimulation. And the spatial feature analysis showed that the two types of features of the annular sector pair in the lower visual field were significantly higher than those in the upper visual field. This study further used the filter bank and ensemble task-related component analysis to calculate the classification accuracy of annular sector pairs under three-phase modulations, and the average accuracy was up to 91.5%, which proved that the phase-modulated SSaVEP features could be used to encode high- frequency SSaVEP. In summary, the results of this study provide new ideas for enhancing the features of high-frequency SSaVEP signals and expanding the instruction set of the traditional steady state visual evoked potential paradigm.

Progress of classification algorithms for motor imagery electroencephalogram signals / 生物医学工程学杂志

Motor imagery (MI), motion intention of the specific body without actual movements, has attracted wide attention in fields as neuroscience. Classification algorithms for motor imagery electroencephalogram (MI-EEG) signals are able to distinguish different MI tasks based on the physiological information contained by the EEG signals, especially the features extracted from them. In recent years, there have been some new advances in classification algorithms for MI-EEG signals in terms of classifiers versus machine learning strategies. In terms of classifiers, traditional machine learning classifiers have been improved by some researchers, deep learning and Riemannian geometry classifiers have been widely applied as well. In terms of machine learning strategies, ensemble learning, adaptive learning, and transfer learning strategies have been utilized to improve classification accuracies or reach other targets. This paper reviewed the progress of classification algorithms for MI-EEG signals, summarized and evaluated the existing classifiers and machine learning strategies, to provide new ideas for developing classification algorithms with higher performance.

Cortical excitability effects of stimulation intensity change speed during NMES.

Rehabilitation method of motor dysfunction is a challenging issue of neural rehabilitation. Neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) has been frequently used in rehabilitation therapy to improve neural recovery such as stroke and spinal cord injury. Stimulus, acting on sensorimotor neural system components, resulted in the increased cortical excitability which accompanied with motor performance improvement. Stimulus information conveyed by sensory system included below four elementary attributes: modality, location, intensity, and timing. But, few works has been reported about effect of the stimulation intensity change speed (SICS). In this paper, we studied the effects of SICS by event-related desynchronization (ERD) or event-related synchronization (ERS) and EEG source analysis by exact low resolution brain electric tomography (eLORETA). The results suggested that brain function areas were sensitive to SICS. Using fast SICS could evoked more significant cortical excitability than the slow one. We demonstrated the availability of an efficient NMES method, additionally implied the rehabilitation potential of cortical excitability enhancement in sensorimotor cortex for motor dysfunction.