Decoding Movement-Related Cortical Potentials Based on Subject-Dependent and Section-Wise Spectral Filtering

• Published in: IEEE transactions on neural systems and rehabilitation engineering Vol. 28; no. 3; pp. 687 - 698
• Main Authors: Jeong, Ji-Hoon, Kwak, No-Sang, Guan, Cuntai, Lee, Seong-Whan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.03.2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Brain-machine interface; Cerebral cortex; Data acquisition; Datasets; Decoding; Electrodes; Electroencephalography; Electromyography; Exoskeleton; Exoskeletons; Filtration; Frequencies; Legged locomotion; Man-machine interfaces; movement-related cortical potentials; Muscles; Spectra; Statistical analysis
• DOI: 10.1109/TNSRE.2020.2966826
• ISSN: 1534-4320; 1558-0210

An important challenge in developing a movement-related cortical potential (MRCP)-based brain-machine interface (BMI) is an accurate decoding of the user intention for real-world environments. However, the performance remains insufficient for real-time decoding owing to the endogenous signal characteristics compared to other BMI paradigms. This study aims to enhance the MRCP decoding performance from the perspective of preprocessing techniques (i.e., spectral filtering). To the best of our knowledge,existing MRCP studies have used spectral filters with a fixed frequency bandwidth for all subjects. Hence, we propose a subject-dependent and section-wise spectral filtering (SSSF) method that considers the subjects' individual MRCP characteristics for two different temporal sections. In this study, MRCP data were acquired under a powered exoskeleton environments in which the subjects conducted self-initiated walking. We evaluated our method using both our experimental data and a public dataset (BNCI Horizon 2020). The decoding performance using the SSSF was 0.86 (±0.09), and the performance on the public dataset was 0.73 (±0.06) across all subjects. The experimental results showed a statistically significant enhancement (p<; 0.01) compared with the fixed frequency bands used in previous methods on both datasets. In addition, we presented successful decoding results from a pseudoonline analysis. Therefore, we demonstrated that the proposed SSSF method can involve more meaningful MRCP information than conventional methods.