Enhance decoding of pre-movement EEG patterns for brain-computer interfaces

Objective. In recent years, brain-computer interface (BCI) systems based on electroencephalography (EEG) have developed rapidly. However, the decoding of voluntary finger pre-movements from EEG is still a challenge for BCIs. This study aimed to analyze the pre-movement EEG features in time and frequency domains and design an efficient method to decode the movement-related patterns. Approach. In this study, we first investigated the EEG features induced by the intention of left and right finger movements. Specifically, the movement-related cortical potential (MRCP) and event-related desynchronization (ERD) features were extracted using discriminative canonical pattern matching (DCPM) and common spatial patterns (CSP), respectively. Then, the two types of features were classified by two fisher discriminant analysis (FDA) classifiers, respectively. Their decision values were further assembled to facilitate the classification. To verify the validity of the proposed method, a private dataset containing 12 subjects and a public dataset from BCI competition II were used for estimating the classification accuracy. Main results. As a result, for the private dataset, the combination of DCPM and CSP achieved an average accuracy of 80.96%, which was 5.08% higher than the single DCPM method (p < 0.01) and 10.23% higher than the single CSP method (p < 0.01). Notably, the highest accuracy could achieve 91.5% for the combination method. The test accuracy of dataset IV of BCI competition II was 90%, which was equal to the best result in the existing literature. Significance. The results demonstrate the MRCP and ERD features of pre-movements contain significantly discriminative information, which are complementary to each other, and thereby could be well recognized by the proposed combination method of DCPM and CSP. Therefore, this study provides a promising approach for the decoding of pre-movement EEG patterns, which is significant for the development of BCIs.