Estimating and approaching the maximum information rate of noninvasive visual brain-computer interface.

An essential priority of visual brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) is to enhance the information transfer rate (ITR) to achieve high-speed communication. Despite notable progress, noninvasive visual BCIs have encountered a plateau in ITRs, leaving it uncertain whether higher ITRs are achievable. In this study, we used information theory to study the characteristics and capacity of the visual-evoked channel, which leads us to investigate whether and how we can decode higher information rates in a visual BCI system. Using information theory, we estimate the upper and lower bounds of the information rate with the white noise (WN) stimulus. Consequently, we found out that the information rate is determined by the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the frequency domain, which reflects the spectrum resources of the channel. Based on this discovery, we propose a broadband WN BCI by implementing stimuli on a broader frequency band than the steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs)-based BCI. Through validation, the broadband BCI outperforms the SSVEP BCI by an impressive 7 bps, setting a record of 50 bps. The integration of information theory and the decoding analysis presented in this study offers valuable insights applicable to general sensory-evoked BCIs, providing a potential direction of next-generation human-machine interaction systems.

Prediction of 6-month poststroke spasticity in patients with acute first-ever stroke by machine learning.

OBJECTIVE: Poststroke spasticity (PSS) reduces arm function and leads to low levels of independence. This study suggested applying machine learning (ML) from routinely available data to support the clinical management of PSS. DESIGN: 172 patients with acute first-ever stroke were included in this prospective cohort study. Twenty clinical information and rehabilitation assessments were obtained to train various ML algorithms for predicting 6-month PSS defined by a modified Ashworth scale (MAS) score ≥ 1. Factors significantly relevant were also defined. RESULTS: The study results indicated that multivariate adaptive regression spline (area under the curve (AUC) value: 0.916; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.906-0.923), adaptive boosting (AUC: 0.962; 95% CI: 0.952-0.973), random forest (RF) (AUC: 0.975; 95% CI: 0.968-0.981), support vector machine (SVM) (AUC: 0.980; 95% CI: 0.970-0.989) outperformed the traditional logistic model (AUC: 0.897; 95% CI: 0.884-0.910) (P < 0.05). Among all of the algorithms, the RF and SVM models outperformed the others (P < 0.05). FMA score, days in hospital, age, stroke location, and paretic side were the most important features. CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that ML algorithms can help augment clinical decision-making processes for the assessment of PSS occurrence, which may enhance the efficacy of management for patients with PSS in the future.

A novel ultrafast and highly sensitive NIR fluorescent probe for the detection of organophosphorus pesticides in foods and biological systems.

The threat posed by organophosphorus pesticides (OPS) to food safety, human health, and the ecological environment is significant, which underscoring the need for the development of new detection tools. We designed and synthesized a NIR fluorescent probe PT-CES which targets carboxylesterase (CES), for the detection of OPS based on the principle of enzyme inhibition. The PT-CES is capable of instantaneous response to CES, exhibiting excellent stability, anti-interference capability. PT-CES realizes the quantitative detection of CES and OPS. It is noteworthy that PT-CES shows excellent stable and accurate detection ability in vegetable pesticide testing. It also enables the monitoring of CES activity in cells and liver tissue. This provides a novel tool for tracking the effect of OPS on CES activity in biological systems. Furthermore, it provides a useful method for ensuring food safety and enhancing pesticide residue analysis.

Global Adaptive Transformer for Cross-Subject Enhanced EEG Classification.

Due to the individual difference, EEG signals from other subjects (source) can hardly be used to decode the mental intentions of the target subject. Although transfer learning methods have shown promising results, they still suffer from poor feature representation or neglect long-range dependencies. In light of these limitations, we propose Global Adaptive Transformer (GAT), an domain adaptation method to utilize source data for cross-subject enhancement. Our method uses parallel convolution to capture temporal and spatial features first. Then, we employ a novel attention-based adaptor that implicitly transfers source features to the target domain, emphasizing the global correlation of EEG features. We also use a discriminator to explicitly drive the reduction of marginal distribution discrepancy by learning against the feature extractor and the adaptor. Besides, an adaptive center loss is designed to align the conditional distribution. With the aligned source and target features, a classifier can be optimized to decode EEG signals. Experiments on two widely used EEG datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, primarily due to the effectiveness of the adaptor. These results indicate that GAT has good potential to enhance the practicality of BCI.

EEG Conformer: Convolutional Transformer for EEG Decoding and Visualization.

Due to the limited perceptual field, convolutional neural networks (CNN) only extract local temporal features and may fail to capture long-term dependencies for EEG decoding. In this paper, we propose a compact Convolutional Transformer, named EEG Conformer, to encapsulate local and global features in a unified EEG classification framework. Specifically, the convolution module learns the low-level local features throughout the one-dimensional temporal and spatial convolution layers. The self-attention module is straightforwardly connected to extract the global correlation within the local temporal features. Subsequently, the simple classifier module based on fully-connected layers is followed to predict the categories for EEG signals. To enhance interpretability, we also devise a visualization strategy to project the class activation mapping onto the brain topography. Finally, we have conducted extensive experiments to evaluate our method on three public datasets in EEG-based motor imagery and emotion recognition paradigms. The experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and has great potential to be a new baseline for general EEG decoding. The code has been released in https://github.com/eeyhsong/EEG-Conformer.

Motor Imagery EEG Decoding Method Based on a Discriminative Feature Learning Strategy.

With the rapid development of deep learning, more and more deep learning-based motor imagery electroencephalograph (EEG) decoding methods have emerged in recent years. However, the existing deep learning-based methods usually only adopt the constraint of classification loss, which hardly obtains the features with high discrimination and limits the improvement of EEG decoding accuracy. In this paper, a discriminative feature learning strategy is proposed to improve the discrimination of features, which includes the central distance loss (CD-loss), the central vector shift strategy, and the central vector update process. First, the CD-loss is proposed to make the same class of samples converge to the corresponding central vector. Then, the central vector shift strategy extends the distance between different classes of samples in the feature space. Finally, the central vector update process is adopted to avoid the non-convergence of CD-loss and weaken the influence of the initial value of central vectors on the final results. In addition, overfitting is another severe challenge for deep learning-based EEG decoding methods. To deal with this problem, a data augmentation method based on circular translation strategy is proposed to expand the experimental datasets without introducing any extra noise or losing any information of the original data. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct some experiments on two public motor imagery EEG datasets (BCI competition IV 2a and 2b dataset), respectively. The comparison with current state-of-the-art methods indicates that our method achieves the highest average accuracy and good stability on the two experimental datasets.

Two-branch 3D convolutional neural network for motor imagery EEG decoding.

Objective.The original motor imagery electroencephalography (MI-EEG) data contains not only temporal features but also a large number of spatial features related to the distribution of electrodes on the brain. However, in the process of MI-EEG decoding, most of the current convolutional neural network (CNN) based methods do not make the utmost of the spatial features related to electrode distribution.Approach.In this study, we adopt a concise 3D representation for the MI-EEG data to take full advantage of the spatial features and propose a two-branch 3D CNN (TB-3D CNN) for the 3D representation of MI-EEG data. First, the spatial and temporal features of the input 3D samples are extracted by the spatial and temporal feature learning branches, respectively, to avoid the mutual interference between the temporal and spatial features. Then, the central loss is introduced into the TB-3D CNN framework to further improve the MI-EEG decoding accuracy. And a 3D data augmentation method based on the cyclic translation of time dimension is proposed for the 3D representation method to alleviate the overfitting problem.Main results.Some experiments are conducted on the famous BCI competition IV 2a dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed MI-EEG decoding method. The experimental results comparison with some state-of-the-art methods demonstrates that the average accuracy of our method is 4.42% higher than that of the best of the comparative methods.Significance.The proposed MI-EEG decoding method has great promise to improve the performance of motor imagery brain-computer interface system.

A novel motor imagery EEG decoding method based on feature separation.

Objective. Motor imagery electroencephalography (EEG) decoding is a vital technology for the brain-computer interface (BCI) systems and has been widely studied in recent years. However, the original EEG signals usually contain a lot of class-independent information, and the existing motor imagery EEG decoding methods are easily interfered by this irrelevant information, which greatly limits the decoding accuracy of these methods.Approach. To overcome the interference of the class-independent information, a motor imagery EEG decoding method based on feature separation is proposed in this paper. Furthermore, a feature separation network based on adversarial learning (FSNAL) is designed for the feature separation of the original EEG samples. First, the class-related features and class-independent features are separated by the proposed FSNAL framework, and then motor imagery EEG decoding is performed only according to the class-related features to avoid the adverse effects of class-independent features.Main results. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed motor imagery EEG decoding method, we conduct some experiments on two public EEG datasets (the BCI competition IV 2a and 2b datasets). The experimental results comparison between our method and some state-of-the-art methods demonstrates that our motor imagery EEG decoding method outperforms all the compared methods on the two experimental datasets.Significance. Our motor imagery EEG decoding method can alleviate the interference of class-independent features, and it has great application potential for improving the performance of motor imagery BCI systems in the near future.

A Practical EEG-Based Human-Machine Interface to Online Control an Upper-Limb Assist Robot.

Background and Objective: Electroencephalography (EEG) can be used to control machines with human intention, especially for paralyzed people in rehabilitation exercises or daily activities. Some effort was put into this but still not enough for online use. To improve the practicality, this study aims to propose an efficient control method based on P300, a special EEG component. Moreover, we have developed an upper-limb assist robot system with the method for verification and hope to really help paralyzed people. Methods: We chose P300, which is highly available and easily accepted to obtain the user's intention. Preprocessing and spatial enhancement were firstly implemented on raw EEG data. Then, three approaches- linear discriminant analysis, support vector machine, and multilayer perceptron -were compared in detail to accomplish an efficient P300 detector, whose output was employed as a command to control the assist robot. Results: The method we proposed achieved an accuracy of 94.43% in the offline test with the data from eight participants. It showed sufficient reliability and robustness with an accuracy of 80.83% and an information transfer rate of 15.42 in the online test. Furthermore, the extended test showed remarkable generalizability of this method that can be used in more complex application scenarios. Conclusion: From the results, we can see that the proposed method has great potential for helping paralyzed people easily control an assist robot to do numbers of things.