In traditional brain–computer interface (BCI) studies, binary communication systems have generally been implemented using two mental tasks arbitrarily assigned to “yes” or “no” intentions (e.g., mental arithmetic calculation for “yes”). A recent pilot study performed with one paralyzed patient showed the possibility of a more intuitive paradigm for binary BCI communications, in which the patient’s internal yes/no intentions were directly decoded from functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). We investigated whether such an “fNIRS-based direct intention decoding” paradigm can be reliably used for practical BCI communications. Eight healthy subjects participated in this study, and each participant was administered 70 disjunctive questions. Brain hemodynamic responses were recorded using a multichannel fNIRS device, while the participants were internally expressing “yes” or “no” intentions to each question. Different feature types, feature numbers, and time window sizes were tested to investigate optimal conditions for classifying the internal binary intentions. About 75% of the answers were correctly classified when the individual best feature set was employed (75.89% ±1.39 and 74.08% ±2.87 for oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin responses, respectively), which was significantly higher than a random chance level (68.57% for p<0.001). The kurtosis feature showed the highest mean classification accuracy among all feature types. The grand-averaged hemodynamic responses showed that wide brain regions are associated with the processing of binary implicit intentions. Our experimental results demonstrated that direct decoding of internal binary intention has the potential to be used for implementing more intuitive and user-friendly communication systems for patients with motor disabilities.
A number of recent studies have demonstrated that near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a promising neuroimaging modality for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). So far, most NIRS-based BCI studies have focused on enhancing the accuracy of the classification of different mental tasks. In the present study, we evaluated the performances of a variety of mental task combinations in order to determine the mental task pairs that are best suited for customized NIRS-based BCIs. To this end, we recorded event-related hemodynamic responses while seven participants performed eight different mental tasks. Classification accuracies were then estimated for all possible pairs of the eight mental tasks (C82=28). Based on this analysis, mental task combinations with relatively high classification accuracies frequently included the following three mental tasks: “mental multiplication,” “mental rotation,” and “right-hand motor imagery.” Specifically, mental task combinations consisting of two of these three mental tasks showed the highest mean classification accuracies. It is expected that our results will be a useful reference to reduce the time needed for preliminary tests when discovering individual-specific mental task combinations.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.