A Pre-trained EEG-to-MEG Generative Framework for Enhancing BCI Decoding

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel EEG-to-MEG generative framework that synthesizes MEG signals from EEG data, improving BCI decoding performance and addressing data scarcity issues in non-invasive brain-computer interfaces.

Contribution

It presents the first cross-modal EEG-MEG generation framework leveraging pre-trained models and novel modules to synthesize MEG signals from EEG data effectively.

Findings

Synthesized MEG signals match real MEG in time-frequency and source patterns.

Using generated MEG improves BCI decoding on both paired and EEG-only datasets.

Framework demonstrates high consistency and enhances BCI performance.

Abstract

Electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) play important and complementary roles in non-invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) decoding. However, compared to the low cost and portability of EEG, MEG is more expensive and less portable, which severely limits the practical application of MEG in BCI systems. To overcome this limitation, this study proposes the first cross-modal generation framework based on EEG-MEG spatiotemporal coupled representations to synthesize MEG signals cost-effectively. The framework first extracts general neural activity representations through a pre-trained EEG model. Building upon these representations, the framework effectively learns the lower spatial dispersion and higher high-frequency sensitivity of MEG via the spatial focus mapping module and the broadband spectral calibration module. Experimental results demonstrate that the synthesized MEG signals show high consistency with the real MEG in both time-frequency characteristics and source space activation patterns. More importantly, downstream BCI decoding experiments demonstrate that using synthesized MEG leads to performance enhancements not only on paired EEG-MEG datasets but also on independent EEG-only datasets. Overall, this framework opens a new avenue for overcoming data bottlenecks in BCI.