Decoding ECoG signal into 3D hand translation using deep learning

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that deep learning models, especially CNN and LSTM architectures, significantly improve the decoding accuracy of 3D hand movements from ECoG signals in brain-computer interfaces, surpassing traditional linear models.

Contribution

The paper introduces deep learning architectures for decoding 3D hand movements from ECoG signals, outperforming existing linear models in accuracy.

Findings

CNN architectures outperform multilinear models.

LSTM benefits from sequential data structure.

Deep learning increases cosine similarity by up to 60%.

Abstract

Motor brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are a promising technology that may enable motor-impaired people to interact with their environment. Designing real-time and accurate BCI is crucial to make such devices useful, safe, and easy to use by patients in a real-life environment. Electrocorticography (ECoG)-based BCIs emerge as a good compromise between invasiveness of the recording device and good spatial and temporal resolution of the recorded signal. However, most ECoG signal decoders used to predict continuous hand movements are linear models. These models have a limited representational capacity and may fail to capture the relationship between ECoG signal and continuous hand movements. Deep learning (DL) models, which are state-of-the-art in many problems, could be a solution to better capture this relationship. In this study, we tested several DL-based architectures to predict imagined 3D continuous hand translation using time-frequency features extracted from ECoG signals. The dataset used in the analysis is a part of a long-term clinical trial (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT02550522) and was acquired during a closed-loop experiment with a tetraplegic subject. The proposed architectures include multilayer perceptron (MLP), convolutional neural networks (CNN), and long short-term memory networks (LSTM). The accuracy of the DL-based and multilinear models was compared offline using cosine similarity. Our results show that CNN-based architectures outperform the current state-of-the-art multilinear model. The best architecture exploited the spatial correlation between neighboring electrodes with CNN and benefited from the sequential character of the desired hand trajectory by using LSTMs. Overall, DL increased the average cosine similarity, compared to the multilinear model, by up to 60%, from 0.189 to 0.302 and from 0.157 to 0.249 for the left and right hand, respectively.