Modeling and classification of voluntary and imagery movements for brain-computer interface from fNIR and EEG signals through convolutional neural network

Md Asadur Rahman; Mohammad Shorif Uddin; Mohiuddin Ahmad

doi:10.1007/s13755-019-0081-5

Modeling and classification of voluntary and imagery movements for brain-computer interface from fNIR and EEG signals through convolutional neural network

Health Inf Sci Syst. 2019 Oct 12;7(1):22. doi: 10.1007/s13755-019-0081-5. eCollection 2019 Dec.

Authors

Md Asadur Rahman¹, Mohammad Shorif Uddin², Mohiuddin Ahmad³

Affiliations

¹ 1Department of Biomedical Engineering, Khulna University of Engineering & Technology (KUET), Khulna, Bangladesh.
² 2Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
³ 3Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Khulna University of Engineering & Technology (KUET), Khulna, Bangladesh.

Abstract

Practical brain-computer interface (BCI) demands the learning-based adaptive model that can handle diverse problems. To implement a BCI, usually functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIR) is used for measuring functional changes in brain oxygenation and electroencephalography (EEG) for evaluating the neuronal electric potential regarding the psychophysiological activity. Since the fNIR modality has an issue of temporal resolution, fNIR alone is not enough to achieve satisfactory classification accuracy as multiple neural stimuli are produced by voluntary and imagery movements. This leads us to make a combination of fNIR and EEG with a view to developing a BCI model for the classification of the brain signals of the voluntary and imagery movements. This work proposes a novel approach to prepare functional neuroimages from the fNIR and EEG using eight different movement-related stimuli. The neuroimages are used to train a convolutional neural network (CNN) to formulate a predictive model for classifying the combined fNIR-EEG data. The results reveal that the combined fNIR-EEG modality approach along with a CNN provides improved classification accuracy compared to a single modality and conventional classifiers. So, the outcomes of the proposed research work will be very helpful in the implementation of the finer BCI system.

Keywords: Brain–computer interface (BCI); Convolutional neural network (CNN); Electroencephalography (EEG); Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIR); Modeling and classification; Voluntary and imagery movements.