Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE

Engineering in Medicine and Biology 27th Annual Conference

Shanghai, China, September 1-4, 2005

EEG-based Discrimination of Elbow/Shoulder Torques using Brain Computer

Interface Algorithms: Implications for Rehabilitation
J. Zhou1, J. Yao2, J. Deng3, J. Dewald2,3,4
1
Department of Computer Science, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, USA
2
Department of Physical Therapy and Human Movement Sciences, Northwestern University, IL, USA
3
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Northwestern University, IL, USA
4
Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Northwestern University, IL, USA
Abstract— Brain computer interface (BCI) algorithms are applied for clinical use especially when brain reorganization
used to predict the torque generation in the direction of may occur such as following stroke and spinal cord injury,
shoulder abduction or elbow flexion using scalp EEG signals which may increase the difficulty of movement prediction.
from 163 electrodes. Based on features extracted from both In this paper, we present results of a preliminary study
frequency and time domains, three classifiers are employed on predicting the subject’s intent of shoulder abduction
including support vector classifier, classification trees and K
nearest neighbor. Support vector classifier achieves the highest
(SABD) or elbow flexion (EF) using advanced BCI
recognition rate of 92.9% on two able-bodied subjects in algorithms based on 163-channel scalp EEG signals. This is
average. The recognition rates we obtained on the able-bodied the first attempt using BCI to separate shoulder/elbow motor
subjects are among the highest compared with previous reports tasks in able-bodied and hemiparetic stroke subjects. It is
on predicting motor intent using scalp EEG. This demonstrates also the first time such a large number of electrodes are used
the feasibility of separating the shoulder/elbow torques using in EEG-based BCI study. In order to derive effective
scalp EEG as well as the potential of support vector classifier algorithms, we investigate the performance of combining
in applications of BCI. Preliminary experiments on two time-frequency feature extraction with three different
hemiparetic stroke subjects using support vector classifier classifiers, i.e., Support Vector Classier (SVC),
reports an accuracy of 84.1% in average, which shows an
increased difficulty in predicting intent presumably due to
Classification and Regression Tree (CART), and K-nearest
cortical reorganization resulting from the stroke. neighbor (KNN). Our preliminary results demonstrate that
SVC has the best potential in predicting upper arm
Keywords— BCI, EEG, Support Vector Classifier, movements and is a promising candidate for the use of BCI
Shoulder Abduction, Elbow Flexion, in rehabilitation applications.

I. INTRODUCTION II. METHODOLOGY

Brain computer interface (or BCI) recently emerged as a A. Experimental Setup

technique to convey brain derived signals for
communication and control [1-4]. These studies demonstrate
that BCI provides a non-muscular way to convey a user’s
intent. In particular, BCI based on electro-encephalogram
(EEG) is a promising candidate for use in human
rehabilitation. Compared with invasive methods that use
neuronal action potentials or local field potentials recorded
within the brain, noninvasive EEG signals recorded from
scalp are convenient, safe and inexpensive. Various
components of EEG signals have been found useful for
movement prediction including localized changes in spectral
power of spontaneous EEG related to sensorimotor
processes [5][6], slow cortical potentials [7] and various
types of event-related potentials [8-10].
However, despite the progress in using BCI for the
prediction of motor intents, the average recognition rate
achieved is around 80% [10-12]. Mensh et al. [13], as the
winner of BCI competition 2003, reported an 88.7%
recognition rate for cursor movement in one able-bodied
subject. What’s more, there has been few exploration of
effective BCI algorithms that can separate motor tasks
originating from close regions on the same hemisphere such
as those correspond to shoulder versus elbow movements.
Further study is thus required before BCI algorithms can be
Each subject learned to self-initiate the generation of
isometric shoulder abduction (SABD) or elbow flexion (EF)
at a level of 25% of his/her maximum voluntary torques
(MVTs). EEG and torques were collected during the
generation of isometric elbow/shoulder torque.
Subjects were cast at the wrist and secured to a six
degree of freedom (DOF) load cell with the shoulder at 75°
abduction, 40° flexion and the elbow at a 90° flexion angle.
In this position, the tip of the hand was approximately
aligned with the median sagittal plane of the subject. In
order to minimize the effect of trunk muscle activation,
subjects were seated in a Biodex chair with the trunk
secured and the shoulders strapped to the back of the chair.
A computer monitor was placed in front of the subject to
provide visual feedback of the torque generation in the
training protocol.
Scalp recordings were made using a 163-channel EEG
system with active electrodes. The electrodes are mounted
on a stretchable fabric based on a 10/20 system. The cap
was fitted on the head of the subject lining the Cz electrode
with the intersection of the planes defined by the nasion,
inion, and pre-auricular points. The skin under each
electrode site was prepared and conductive gel was injected

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to achieve electrode impedances lower than 5 kŸ
throughout the experiment. EEG data were collected at 1000
Hz sampling rate. Anti-aliasing filtering (100 Hz) was
provided before data acquisition. The system was equipped
active electrodes that provide a first amplification stage,
allowing detection of EEG signals with a higher SNR and
quicker preparation.
B. Feature Extraction
Both frequency and time domain features were
extracted from the EEG signal. First, a finite difference
Surface Laplacian (SL) transformation was applied to each
channel as a spatial high-pass filter to reduce the smearing
effects caused by head volume conductor and to increase the
signal noise ratio (SNR). Due to the possibility that for the
same motor task subjects use different strategies, we used
principal component analysis (PCA) to calculate the
covariance complexity of the signals. When a data set was
considered highly complex, we divided the set into two
subsets using the average complexity value as the dividing
line [14]. Next, we extracted features by decomposing
signals in both frequency bands and time courses. The
constant Q decomposition was conducted in the frequency
domain to divide the signals into frequency bins from 5 to
34 Hz with a group of band-pass filters. Q is the ratio of
center frequency over bandwidth (set as 4). The information
in the time domain within each frequency bin is then
obtained by applying Hilbert transformation to extract the
profiles of the oscillatory activities. The profiles were
divided into equal-length (around 55 ms of each interval)
with 50% overlapping. The feature for each time interval
was the integrated profile of that time duration, which can
be viewed as the instantaneous power on the corresponding
time-frequency grid. As the result of feature extraction, each
trial can be represented by a spatial pattern over the channel
distribution on the scalp where each channel has its two-
dimensional feature (i.e., features in time and frequency
domains).
For more details of the exploited feature extraction
algorithm, refer to [10] and [14]. In this paper, our focus is
on comparing different classifiers, and particularly
examining the performance of support vector classifier in
separating the shoulder versus elbow movements in able-
bodied and hemiparetic stroke subjects.
C. Classifiers
a. Support Vector Classifier
The support vector classifier is a relatively new
classification technique developed by Vapnik [15] which
has reported strong performance in a number of real-world
applications including BCI [12][16]. The basic idea is to
find an optimal separating hyperplane for two classes that
maximizes the margin (see definition of margin below). The
algorithm looks for the optimization weight vector (w) and
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offset (b) of the discriminating hyperplane by solving the
following quadratic problem:
I
min{|| w ||2 C ¦[ i2 }
w,b
i
subject to
y i (w ˜ xi  b) t 1  [ i ,
[ i t 0; w ¦D i y i x i , i 1,.., I .
i
where [i are called slack variables which ensures that the
problem has a solution when the data are not linearly
separable; yi is the ith label; i is the index of the sample
(vector); and Di is the Lagrange coefficient obtained when
using Lagrange theory to solve the above optimization
problem. The margin is defined as 2/||w||2. Geometrically, as
illustrated by Figure 1, the margin is the distance between
the bounding planes of the two data sets. The data vectors
on the bounding planes are critical for finding the solution.
They are called support vectors, which explains the name of
the algorithm.
To solve nonlinear problems, support vector classifier
conducts a transformation from input data space to feature
space by applying a kernel function to the data. Most
commonly used kernel functions are polynomial and
Gaussian. For details, see [17].
Fig. 1 Hyperplane and margin in support vector classifier.
b. Classification and Regression Tree
Classification and regression tree (CART) [18] is a
multi-stage binary decision tree. Every leaf node is
associated with a category. Every other node contains a
decision rule which partitions the feature space into two.
The training process of CART typically contains the
stage of constructing a tree and pruning the tree to reduce
model complexity and avoid overfitting. The testing process
with CART is the process of following the decision rules of
the branches until a leaf node is reached and the category
associated with the leaf node determines the class label for
the testing sample.
 As a classifier, CART has the advantage of doing
implicit feature extraction during the process of tree
construction. In other words, only the features are relevant
with the decision making are contained in the tree. However,
the decision boundaries of CART are linear and typically
parallel to the coordinates, therefore, its performance under
some conditions is less optimal.
c. K Nearest Neighbor
K nearest neighbor (KNN) is a simple classifier that
assigns a label same as the majority label among K nearest
neighbors of the testing sample. The distance measure
between samples is application-specific and we used the
correlation coefficient between two feature maps of two
trials.
III. RESULTS
A. Results from Able-bodied Subjects
Experiments were conducted on two able-bodied male
subjects both with right hand dominance. Each subject
performed around 100 trials of torque generation in either
SABD or EF directions.
The evaluation of the algorithms consisted of two parts:
training and testing. The training procedure provided each
time-frequency interval a weight w(t,f)  [0, 1] proportional
to its contribution. It was calculated using the training
recognition rate achieved by each classifier on the particular
frequency/time grid. Following training, a testing procedure
was performed using 17 fold cross-validation. We divided
the data into 17 sets with about equal numbers of trials per
set for each movement type. In each fold, one set was used
for testing and all the other trials were used to train the
classifier. The reported result is an average on 17 folds.
LibSVM 2.6 [19] is used in our experiment with default
parameters. For each fold, we calculated the recognition rate
as Nc/N, where N is the number of total test trials and Nc is
the number of correctly predicted test trials.
The recognition rates for the two subjects are listed in
Table 1. Figure 2 depicts the weight distribution in the
frequency and time domains for the two subjects.
TABLE 1
RECOGNITION RATE OF THREE BCI ALGORITHMS ON TWO SUBJECTS TO
DISCRIMINATE SHOULDER ABDUCTION AND ELBOW FLEXION.
Subjects\methods Nearest Classification Support
Neighbor and Vector
Classifier Regression Machine
Tree
N1 89.1% 87.6% 94.7%
N2 90.7% 82.1% 91.0%
Mean 89.9% 84.9% 92.9%
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Figure 2 Weights on the frequency and time domain.
Our analysis resulting in the following observations::
1 The support vector classifier outperforms the other two
methods of CART and K Nearest Neighbor. Extracting
features from time and frequency domains makes it an
effective BCI algorithm allowing for an effective
separation between the intent to generate shoulder
abduction versus elbow flexion torques using scalp
EEG signals.
2 The reported recognition rate of 92.9% is among the
highest BCI performances among reports of EEG-based
motor classifications.
3 Figure 2 suggests that some frequency bands have
higher weights than others. However, the physiological
meaning of these differences in weights still requires
further exploration.
4 This paper reports one of the few experiments that uses
as many as 163 electrodes in EEG-based BCI. The
result confirms the feasibility and effectiveness of using
a large number of electrodes for signal collection. In
future work, we will seek to determine the optimal
number of electrodes required to obtain the best
recognition rates.
B. Results from Hemiparetic Stroke Subjects
Obligatory coupling between certain shoulder and
elbow torques is typically found in the moderately to
severely impaired arm stroke patients and results in
discoordination during movement. If movement intentions
can be successfully separated using BCI, then in the long
run, we may apply the algorithms to drive rehabilitation
interventions for the treatment of upper limb
discoordination. However, the associated challenge is the
expected brain reorganization following stroke [20], which
can make the separation between shoulder and elbow
movement intentions more difficult.
To investigate the effectiveness of our algorithms and
the impact of an increased overlap in sensorimotor cortical
areas used during elbow versus shoulder tasks following
stroke, experiments were conducted on two hemiparetic
stroke subjects.. Features were extracted from EEG signals
as described in Section II(B). Torques were separated using
the support vector classifier. Information regarding the two
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