Influence of the Number of Channels and Classification Algorithm on the Performance Robustness to Electrode Shift in Steady-State Visual Evoked Potential-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces - PubMed Skip to main page content
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. 2021 Oct 22:15:750839.
doi: 10.3389/fninf.2021.750839. eCollection 2021.

Influence of the Number of Channels and Classification Algorithm on the Performance Robustness to Electrode Shift in Steady-State Visual Evoked Potential-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces

Affiliations

Influence of the Number of Channels and Classification Algorithm on the Performance Robustness to Electrode Shift in Steady-State Visual Evoked Potential-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces

Hodam Kim et al. Front Neuroinform. .

Abstract

There remains an active investigation on elevating the classification accuracy and information transfer rate of brain-computer interfaces based on steady-state visual evoked potential. However, it has often been ignored that the performance of steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) can be affected through the minor displacement of the electrodes from their optimal locations in practical applications because of the mislocation of electrodes and/or concurrent use of electroencephalography (EEG) devices with external devices, such as virtual reality headsets. In this study, we evaluated the performance robustness of SSVEP-based BCIs with respect to the changes in electrode locations for various channel configurations and classification algorithms. Our experiments involved 21 participants, where EEG signals were recorded from the scalp electrodes densely attached to the occipital area of the participants. The classification accuracies for all the possible cases of electrode location shifts for various channel configurations (1-3 channels) were calculated using five training-free SSVEP classification algorithms, i.e., the canonical correlation analysis (CCA), extended CCA, filter bank CCA, multivariate synchronization index (MSI), and extended MSI (EMSI). Then, the performances of the BCIs were evaluated using two measures, i.e., the average classification accuracy (ACA) across the electrode shifts and robustness to the electrode shift (RES). Our results showed that the ACA increased with an increase in the number of channels regardless of the algorithm. However, the RES was enhanced with an increase in the number of channels only when MSI and EMSI were employed. While both ACA and RES values for the five algorithms were similar under the single-channel condition, both ACA and RES values for MSI and EMSI were higher than those of the other algorithms under the multichannel (i.e., two or three electrodes) conditions. In addition, EMSI outperformed MSI when comparing the ACA and RES values under the multichannel conditions. In conclusion, our results suggested that the use of multichannel configuration and employment of EMSI could make the performance of SSVEP-based BCIs more robust to the electrode shift from the optimal locations.

Keywords: brain-computer interface (BCI); classification algorithm; electrode configurations; performance robustness; steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP).

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Experiment setup and channel combination (A) four 6 × 6 pattern-reversal checkerboard stimuli [frequencies of the four stimuli were set to 6 Hz (top left), 6.66 Hz (top right), 7.5 Hz (bottom left), and 10 Hz (bottom right)] (B) fabricated electrode array pad with dense electrode configuration (C) array pad [distance between the two neighboring electrodes was set to 1.3 cm,; center of the array pad was placed at Oz and according to the extended international 10–20 system; 21 channels were categorized into three categories depending on the location of the channel: left (channel 1–9), middle (channel 7–15), and right (channel 13–21)] (D) possible channel combinations with respect to the number of channels used for classification [for example, when two EEG signals recorded at two channels were used to classify the frequency of SSVEP, the classification accuracy was calculated in a total 81 channel combinations by combining the left 9 channels (channel 1–9) and right 9 channels (channel 13–21)].
Figure 2
Figure 2
Mean and SD of the average classification accuracy across the electrode shift (ACA) across the subjects with five SSVEP classification algorithms in the case of 3 channels and seven window lengths (wl) (black, gray, and white bars denote the mean accuracies of 1 channel, 2 channels, and 3 channels, respectively; the error bars represent the SD ACA).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Mean and standard deviation of the robustness to the electrode shift (RES) across the subjects with five SSVEP classification algorithms in the case with the number of channels as 3 and window length (wl) as 7 (black, gray, and white bars denote the mean accuracies in the cases with the number of channels as 1, 2, and 3, respectively; the error bars represent standard deviations of RES).
Figure 4
Figure 4
Nine channel combinations corresponding to the cases, in which all the electrodes shift to the same direction and the mean accuracies across the subjects of the nine-channel combinations (accuracies were calculated using EMSI and the nine mean accuracies all the cases with various number of channels and each window length were min–max normalized).

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