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Ali Bashashati

Publications and source records attributed to Ali Bashashati.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

EMG and EOG artifacts in brain computer interface systems: A survey.

It is widely accepted in the brain computer interface (BCI) research community that neurological phenomena are the only source of control in any BCI system. Artifacts are undesirable signals that can interfere with neurological phenomena. They may change the characteristics of neurological phenomena or even be mistakenly used as the source of control in BCI systems. Electrooculography (EOG) and electromyography (EMG) artifacts are considered among the most important sources of physiological artifacts in BCI systems. Currently, however, there is no comprehensive review of EMG and EOG artifacts in BCI literature. This paper reviews EOG and EMG artifacts associated with BCI systems and the current methods for dealing with them. More than 250 refereed journal and conference papers are reviewed and categorized based on the type of neurological phenomenon used and the methods employed for handling EOG and EMG artifacts. This study reveals weaknesses in BCI studies related to reporting the methods of handling EMG and EOG artifacts. Most BCI papers do not report whether or not they have considered the presence of EMG and EOG artifacts in the brain signals. Only a small percentage of BCI papers report automated methods for rejection or removal of artifacts in their systems. As the lack of dealing with artifacts may result in the deterioration of the performance of a particular BCI system during practical applications, it is necessary to develop automatic methods to handle artifacts or to design BCI systems whose performance is robust to the presence of artifacts.

Algorithms↗

Automatic user customization for improving the performance of a self-paced brain interface system.

Customizing the parameter values of brain interface (BI) systems by a human expert has the advantage of being fast and computationally efficient. However, as the number of users and EEG channels grows, this process becomes increasingly time consuming and exhausting. Manual customization also introduces inaccuracies in the estimation of the parameter values. In this paper, the performance of a self-paced BI system whose design parameter values were automatically user customized using a genetic algorithm (GA) is studied. The GA automatically estimates the shapes of movement-related potentials (MRPs), whose features are then extracted to drive the BI. Offline analysis of the data of eight subjects revealed that automatic user customization improved the true positive (TP) rate of the system by an average of 6.68% over that whose customization was carried out by a human expert, i.e., by visually inspecting the MRP templates. On average, the best improvement in the TP rate (an average of 9.82%) was achieved for four individuals with spinal cord injury. In this case, the visual estimation of the parameter values of the MRP templates was very difficult because of the highly noisy nature of the EEG signals. For four able-bodied subjects, for which the MRP templates were less noisy, the automatic user customization led to an average improvement of 3.58% in the TP rate. The results also show that the inter-subject variability of the TP rate is also reduced compared to the case when user customization is carried out by a human expert. These findings provide some primary evidence that automatic user customization leads to beneficial results in the design of a self-paced BI for individuals with spinal cord injury.

Algorithms↗

User customization of the feature generator of an asynchronous brain interface.

A study that customizes the feature generator parameters of an asynchronous Brain Interface (BI) is discussed. The goal is to detect the presence of a certain pattern, in the ongoing EEG, associated with a specific movement and to improve the system's performance. Results of this study show that customization mostly benefits able-bodied subjects with performance improvements of up to 6.8%. We evaluate the performance of our BI using stratified cross-validation scheme. This scheme repeats the analysis on the different cross-validation sets. It is shown that the performances of the system across the different sets are very similar. Thus, we conclude that a robust performance measure of the system can be obtained by using only one of these performance results.

Artificial Intelligence↗

An improved asynchronous brain interface: making use of the temporal history of the LF-ASD feature vectors.

The low-frequency asynchronous switch design (LF-ASD) has been introduced as a direct brain interface (BI) for asynchronous control applications. Asynchronous interfaces, as opposed to synchronous interfaces, have the advantage of being operational at all times and not only at specific system-defined periods. This paper modifies the LF-ASD design by incorporating into the system more knowledge about the attempted movements. Specifically, the history of feature values extracted from the EEG signal is used to detect a right index finger movement attempt. Using data collected from individuals with high-level spinal cord injuries and able-bodied subjects, it is shown that the error characteristics of the modified design are significantly better than the previous LF-ASD design. The true positive rate percentage increased by up to 15 which corresponds to 50% improvement when the system is operating with false positive rates in the 1-2% range.

Adult↗

Brain-computer interface design for asynchronous control applications: improvements to the LF-ASD asynchronous brain switch.

The low-frequency asynchronous switch design (LF-ASD) was introduced as a direct brain-computer interface (BCI) technology for asynchronous control applications. The LF-ASD operates as an asynchronous brain switch (ABS) which is activated only when a user intends control and maintains an inactive state output when the user is not meaning to control the device (i.e., they may be idle, thinking about a problem, or performing some other action). Results from LF-ASD evaluations have shown promise, although the reported error rates are too high for most practical applications. This paper presents the evaluation of four new LF-ASD designs with data collected from individuals with high-level spinal cord injuries and able-bodied subjects. These new designs incorporated electroencephalographic energy normalization and feature space dimensionality reduction. The error characteristics of the new ABS designs were significantly better than the LF-ASD design with true positive rate increases of approximately 33% for false positive rates in the range of 1%-2%. The results demonstrate that the dimensionality of the LF-ASD feature space can be reduced without performance degradation. The results also confirm previous findings that spinal cord-injured subjects can operate ABS designs to the same ability as able-bodied subjects.

Adult↗