A learnable EEG channel selection method for MI-BCI using efficient channel attention

• Published in: Frontiers in neuroscience Vol. 17; p. 1276067
• Main Authors: Tong, Lina, Qian, Yihui, Peng, Liang, Wang, Chen, Hou, Zeng-Guang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Lausanne Frontiers Research Foundation 20.10.2023; Frontiers Media S.A
• Subjects: Accuracy; attention mechanism; brain-computer interface; channel selection; Classification; Computational neuroscience; Datasets; Deep learning; EEG; Electrodes; Electroencephalography; Mental task performance; Methods; motor imagery; Neural networks; Neuroscience; Signal processing
• ISSN: 1662-453X; 1662-4548; 1662-453X
• DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2023.1276067

Introduction During electroencephalography (EEG)-based motor imagery-brain-computer interfaces (MI-BCIs) task, a large number of electrodes are commonly used, and consume much computational resources. Therefore, channel selection is crucial while ensuring classification accuracy. Methods This paper proposes a channel selection method by integrating the efficient channel attention (ECA) module with a convolutional neural network (CNN). During model training process, the ECA module automatically assigns the channel weights by evaluating the relative importance for BCI classification accuracy of every channel. Then a ranking of EEG channel importance can be established so as to select an appropriate number of channels to form a channel subset from the ranking. In this paper, the ECA module is embedded into a commonly used network for MI, and comparative experiments are conducted on the BCI Competition IV dataset 2a. Results and discussion The proposed method achieved an average accuracy of 75.76% with all 22 channels and 69.52% with eight channels in a four-class classification task, outperforming other state-of-the-art EEG channel selection methods. The result demonstrates that the proposed method provides an effective channel selection approach for EEG-based MI-BCI.