An iterative optimization technique

for robust channel selection in

Motor Imagery based Brain
Computer Interface

presented by
VIKRAM SHENOY HANDIRU
PhD 1st Year,
Interdisciplinary Graduate School,
Nanyang Technological University

25th July 2014

Content

• Introduction
• Literature review
• Motivation
• Proposed method (Iterative Optimization technique)
• Results and Discussion
• Conclusion
• Future work
Introduction

• Electroencephalography (EEG) is a popular signal acquisition

technique for Brain computer Interface (BCI) because of its cost-
effectiveness, portability and ease-of use.

• EEG find widespread applications in the area of neuro-

rehabilitation, neuro-gaming, cognitive enhancement and so on.

• Motor Imagery (MI) based BCI paradigm aims at translating

movement imagination into action commands through computer.
Introduction

• Optimal Channel selection in EEG based BCI is an intriguing

research topic.

• More number of channels result in better spatial resolution but

also lead to noise artifacts and overfitting.

• Fewer channels improve the preparation time, reduces the

artifacts and retains more relevant signal information.

• How to optimally select these relevant channels is the key issue

addressed in this paper.
Literature review
• Existing methods:
– There exist some methods for optimal channel selection like
Common spatial pattern [1], Support Vector Machine [2],
Artificial Neural Network and Genetic Algorithm [3], Sparse
Common Spatial Pattern [4] and Mutual Information
maximization [5].
– These methods do not incorporate apriori information of
neurological background of the task activity.

[1] H. Ramoser, J. Müller-Gerking, and G. Pfurtscheller, “Optimal spatial filtering of single trial EEG during imagined hand movement.,” IEEE Trans.on
Neural Sys. and Rehab. Eng., vol. 8, no. 4, pp, 441-446, Dec. 2000.
[2] T. N. Lal, M. Schröder, T. Hinterberger, J. Weston, M. Bogdan, N. Birbaumer, and B. Schölkopf, “Support vector channel selection in BCI.,” IEEE
Trans. Biomed Eng., vol. 51, no. 6, pp. 1003–10, 2004.
[3] J. Yang, H. Singh, E. L. Hines, F. Schlaghecken, D. D. Iliescu, M. S. Leeson, and N. G. Stocks, “Channel selection and classification of
electroencephalogram signals: an artificial neural network and genetic algorithm-based approach.,” Artificial intelligence in medicine., vol. 55, no. 2, pp.
117–26, Jun. 2012.
[4] M. Arvaneh, C. Guan, K. K. Ang, and C. Quek, “Optimizing the channel selection and classification accuracy in EEG-based BCI.,” IEEE Trans.
Biomed. Eng., vol. 58, no. 6, pp. 1865–73, Jun. 2011.
[5] T. Lan, D. Erdogmus, A. Adami, M. Pavel, and S. Mathan, “Salient EEG channel selection in brain computer interfaces by mutual information
maximization.,” in Proc. of 27th Ann Intl. Conf of the IEEE EMBC, vol. 7, pp. 7064–7067, Jan. 2005.
Motivation

• The existing methods for channel selection have some

shortcomings like
– contamination due to artifacts [1],
– dependence on specific classifier [2],
– parameter selection being crucial [3],
– high computational cost [3,4] and
– Correlation between the channels is not accounted [5].
• Additional neurological background about the task activity would
help in channel selection.
– (For ex: ERD/S activation occurs in the primary motor cortex
region contralateral to the MI task performed)
• This motivated us to include this apriori knowledge to build an
algorithm for robust channel selection.
Proposed Method
Data
Acquisition

Segmentation
3-8 Hz CSP Feature
7-12 Hz selection Classification
CSP
Channel using using SVM
selection 11-16 Hz CSP mRMR

35-40 Hz CSP

Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of the proposed method.

Proposed Channel selection algorithm
• Semi-parametric Initialization:
– For a given channel ck and reference
channel r, weight initialization µk is
inversely proportional to the l2 norm of
distance between the reference channel
and other channels inside the kernel
φ(r, c)  r  c 2 (1)
1
μk 
φ(r, c k ) (2)
• Iterative update of channel weights
(k ) (k ) (k )
μi1  μi  Φi (3)

μi( k )  i( k )  arg min (  i ) arg min (  i )

(4)
 (i k )  k k
arg max(  i ) arg max(  i )
k k

( Ρˆ 0.52 s  Ρˆ 22.5s ) (5)

βi ( k )   100
Ρˆ
0.52.5s
Common Spatial Pattern:
• Most widely used technique in BCI for discriminating two
classes (or tasks).
• EEG data E is projected into a new spatial subspace Z with
W being the projection matrix.
Z=W×E
• Multiband overlapping filter bands from 3-8Hz, 7-12Hz,11-
16Hz,…35-40Hz are used for generating 9 filtered signals E
E  {E38Hz , E712Hz , E1116Hz ....E3540Hz }
Data description
• Dataset 1: (Dataset IVa, BCI Competition III)
– Number of channels used : 118
– Tasks considered in this study : right foot and right hand MI
– Number of subjects : 5 – ‘aa’, ‘al’, ‘av’, ‘aw’ and ‘ay’.
– Number of trials : 280
• Dataset 2: (Dataset 2a, BCI Competition IV)
– Number of channels used : 22
– Tasks considered : right and left hand MI
– Number of subjects : 9 – ‘A01’, ‘A02’, ‘A03’, ‘A04’, ‘A05’,
‘A06’, ‘A07’, ‘A08’ and ‘A09’.
– Number of trials : 72 trials for each MI task.
Results and Discussion
TABLE I
Comparison of classification accuracies of different methods on dataset 1 with 118 channels
Dataset IVa, BCI Competition III

Subject Proposed FBCSP[6] SCSP1 [4] SCSP2 [4]

method (%) (%) (%)
(%)
aa 90.68 93.97 80.71 71.42
al 98.39 99.03 97.14 95.71
av 74.93 69.0 57.14 57.14
aw 94.80 95.1 85.0 77.85
ay 95.18 93.82 91.42 94.28
Mean 90.77 90.01 82.28 79.28

[4] M. Arvaneh, C. Guan, K. K. Ang, and C. Quek, “Optimizing the channel selection and classification accuracy in EEG-
based BCI.,” IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng., vol. 58, no. 6, pp. 1865–73, Jun. 2011.

[6] K. K. Ang, Z. Y. Chin, H. Zhang, and C. Guan, “Filter Bank Common Spatial Pattern (FBCSP) in Brain-Computer
Interface,” in Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN '08), pp. 2390–2397, June
2008.
Results and Discussion
TABLE II
Comparison of classification accuracies of different methods on dataset 2 with 22 channels
Dataset 2a, BCI Competition IV
Subject Proposed All Ch [4] SCSP1 [4] SCSP2 [4]
method (%) (%) (%) (%)
A01 89.65 90.97 91.66 91.66
A02 62.96 56.25 67.36 60.41
A03 95.81 96.25 97.91 97.14
A04 75.03 72.91 72.22 70.83
A05 87.80 63.88 65.27 63.19
A06 66.29 63.88 66.27 61.11
A07 89.06 79.86 84.72 78.47
A08 94.53 97.22 97.22 95.13
A09 69.76 91.66 91.66 93.75
Mean 81.21 79.23 81.63* 79.07

[4] M. Arvaneh, C. Guan, K. K. Ang, and C. Quek, “Optimizing the channel selection and classification accuracy in EEG-
based BCI.,” IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng., vol. 58, no. 6, pp. 1865–73, Jun. 2011.
Results and Discussion
• It can be observed that the spatial
filters corresponding to right and
foot MI tasks are located in their
respective topographic locations
of motor cortex.
• The number of features obtained
using CSP is 36
(2 classes x 9 filter bands x 2
spatial filters).

Fig. 3. CSP plots of 5 subjects (aa, al, av, aw,

ay) in dataset 1 based on reduced number of
channels.
 Results and Discussion

100
95
aa
90
85 al

80 av
Percentage
accuracy

75 aw
70 ay
65
N=10

N=14

N=16

N=18
N=12
N=4

N=6

N=8
N=2

Fig. 4. Performance comparison of using different number of features in the classifier.

• Optimal number of features required for achieving good accuracy is

estimated using mRMR (minimum redundancy maximum relevancy).
Results and Discussion
TABLE III
COMPARISON OF CLASSIFICATION ACCURACIES OF SUBJECT INDEPENDENT CHANNELS AND
SUBJECT SPECIFIC CHANNEL SELECTION FOR THE DATASET WITH 22 CHANNELS
Subject Subject- Subject- Channels used
Independen specific
t Channels
Channels (%)
(%)
A01 87.26 89.65 ‘FC3’,‘FC2’,‘FC4’,
A02 59.86 62.96 ‘C1’,‘C2’,‘C3’,‘C4’, ‘C5’, ‘C6’, ‘CP3’
A03 93.84 95.81 (6 subjects A04, A05,…..A09)
A04 73.29 75.03 ‘FC3’,‘FC2’, ‘FC4’, ‘C1’,‘C2’,‘
C3’,‘C6’,‘CP3’, ‘CP1’
A05 86.14 87.80
A06 60.69 66.29 (6 subjects A01,A02,A03,A07,A08 & A09)
A07 93.14 89.06 ‘FC3’,‘FC4’, ‘C1’, ‘C2’,‘C3’,‘C4’, ‘C5’,
A08 94.13 94.53 ‘C6’, ‘CP3’,’CP4’
A09 70.45 69.76 (6 subjects A01, A02,…..A06)
Mean 79.86 81.21
Results and Discussion

Fig. 5. Histogram plot for statistical estimation of most frequently selected channels across
9 subjects of Dataset IVa.

• Three different combinations of 6 subjects are used as a training set

to get the most relevant channels appearing across all training sets.

• Based on the histogram plot, most frequently selected channels

were used for testing the other 3 subjects
Results and Discussion

• Computational complexity has been an issue in some of the

existing channel selection algorithm [3,4].
• The proposed method is computationally faster in terms of
number of multiplications required.
• This reduction in computations is accounted by reduced number
of channels.
• Computational savings are mainly in evaluating CSP matrix Z =
W×E,
• Complexity Order in matrix computation:
O(N2P) for multiplying W (of size N×N) and E(of size N×P)
Results and Discussion
TABLE IV
Computational complexity of FBCSP using all channels

Dataset 2a – 118 channels Multiplication Addition

Filtering (9 frequency bands) 59472000 59472000
CSP (all channels) 1559521040 1548981280
Total 1618993040 1614400480

TABLE V
Computational complexity of the proposed method using channel selection (10 channels)
Dataset2a – 10 channels Multiplication Addition
Channel selection 31718400 97269760
Filtering (9 frequency bands) 5040000 5040000
CSP (selected 10 channels) 11202800 71092000
173401760
47961200
Total
(97.03% savings) (89.2%
savings)
Conclusion

• In this study, a robust method for optimal channel selection is

proposed.
• ERDS components and prior neurophysiological background
of the MI tasks are considered in the proposed method.
• Evaluation of the proposed method on 2 datasets have
shown good accuracy of mean 90.77% and 81.21%
respectively.
• Robustness is examined by using subject independent
channels.
• This approach paves a new way for robust subject-
independent channel selection in multiple session BCI
experiments.
Future work
“EEG based localized arm movement task
discrimination based on source localization”

Motivation:
• Localized arm movement imagery is beneficial for neurorehabilitation.
• There are few studies[6,7] which have attempted decoding the localized
arm movement.
• However, these studies do not take neural correlation into account.
• For better neurophysiological justification, source localization could be
useful.

[6] Zhou, J., Yao, J., Deng, J., & Dewald, J. P. A. (2009). EEG-based classification for elbow versus shoulder torque
intentions involving stroke subjects. Computers in biology and medicine, 39, 443–452.
[7]. Quandt, F., Reichert, C., Hinrichs, H., Heinze, H. J., Knight, R. T., & Rieger, J. W. (2012). Single trial discrimination of
individual finger movements on one hand: a combined MEG and EEG study. NeuroImage, 59(4), 3316–24.
Future work
Method - Spatial enhancement using improved surface
laplacian estimate

• In a recent work on finger movement classification [8], authors mention that

EEG accuracy could be improved if volume conduction effect can be minimized
further.
• Work done by Deng et.al [2] suggests improved surface laplacian estimates of
cortical potentials.
• However, the accuracy depends critically on the head geometry.
• It employs geometric model computed from BEM using fMRI scans as opposed
to convention spherical model.

[8] K. Liao, R. Xiao, J. Gonzalez and L. Ding (2014), “decoding Individual Finger movements from One hand
using human EEG signals”, PlosOne, vol 9(1),

[9] S. Deng, W. Winter, S. Thorpe and R. Srinivasan “Improved surface laplacian estimates of cortical potential
using realistic models of Head geometry”, IEEE Trans. On Biomed. Engg, vol 59(11), 2012.
Future work
Method - Spatial enhancement using improved surface
laplacian estimate

• To use – ant neuro 3D digitizer

http://www.ant-neuro.com/products/xensor
• Gives 3D position of sensors – which can be used to create near-
perfect head geometry model.
• My hypothesis - Surface laplacian using this geometry would give
better estimation.
• Website (http://www.ant-neuro.com/products/xensor/application-areas)
also suggests that xensor can be used for source localization.

Novelty : This kind of source localization approach has not been used in
the context of localized task classification. Also, spatial enhancement
based improved cortical estimate has not been investigated in this
context.
Thank you 