Research progress and prospect of collaborative brain-computer interface for group brain collaboration / 生物医学工程学杂志

As the most common active brain-computer interaction paradigm, motor imagery brain-computer interface (MI-BCI) suffers from the bottleneck problems of small instruction set and low accuracy, and its information transmission rate (ITR) and practical application are severely limited. In this study, we designed 6-class imagination actions, collected electroencephalogram (EEG) signals from 19 subjects, and studied the effect of collaborative brain-computer interface (cBCI) collaboration strategy on MI-BCI classification performance, the effects of changes in different group sizes and fusion strategies on group multi-classification performance are compared. The results showed that the most suitable group size was 4 people, and the best fusion strategy was decision fusion. In this condition, the classification accuracy of the group reached 77%, which was higher than that of the feature fusion strategy under the same group size (77.31%

EEG-controlled functional electrical stimulation rehabilitation for chronic stroke: system design and clinical application / 医学前沿

Stroke is one of the most serious diseases that threaten human life and health. It is a major cause of death and disability in the clinic. New strategies for motor rehabilitation after stroke are undergoing exploration. We aimed to develop a novel artificial neural rehabilitation system, which integrates brain-computer interface (BCI) and functional electrical stimulation (FES) technologies, for limb motor function recovery after stroke. We conducted clinical trials (including controlled trials) in 32 patients with chronic stroke. Patients were randomly divided into the BCI-FES group and the neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) group. The changes in outcome measures during intervention were compared between groups, and the trends of ERD values based on EEG were analyzed for BCI-FES group. Results showed that the increase in Fugl Meyer Assessment of the Upper Extremity (FMA-UE) and Kendall Manual Muscle Testing (Kendall MMT) scores of the BCI-FES group was significantly higher than that in the sham group, which indicated the practicality and superiority of the BCI-FES system in clinical practice. The change in the laterality coefficient (LC) values based on μ-ERD (ΔLC

Research Progress and Application Prospect of Nerve Rehabilitation by Transcranial Electrical and Magnetic Stimulation / 中国医疗器械杂志

Accidents or diseases may cause impairment or even loss of human motor function, among which stroke is a disease which is most likely to cause disability and seriously endangers social health. During recent years, as a new nerve regulation technology, non-invasive brain stimulation technology can achieve the application of nerve stimulation to the brain, induce and promote neuroplasticity and improve the excitability of cerebral cortex. Especially, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and transcranial magnetic stimulation(TMS) have shown high therapeutic potential in motor rehabilitation. This paper summarizes the mechanism and progress of the research and application of tDCS and TMS in the field of neurorehabilitation. Its technical challenges and future development trends are provided as well.

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.

An online hybrid brain-computer interface combining multiple physiological signals for webpage browse.

The hybrid brain computer interface (hBCI) could provide higher information transfer rate than did the classical BCIs. It included more than one brain-computer or human-machine interact paradigms, such as the combination of the P300 and SSVEP paradigms. Research firstly constructed independent subsystems of three different paradigms and tested each of them with online experiments. Then we constructed a serial hybrid BCI system which combined these paradigms to achieve the functions of typing letters, moving and clicking cursor, and switching among them for the purpose of browsing webpages. Five subjects were involved in this study. They all successfully realized these functions in the online tests. The subjects could achieve an accuracy above 90% after training, which met the requirement in operating the system efficiently. The results demonstrated that it was an efficient system capable of robustness, which provided an approach for the clinic application.