NeuroPath: Practically Adopting Motor Imagery Decoding through EEG Signals

TL;DR

NeuroPath is a neural architecture designed to improve motor imagery decoding from EEG signals, addressing challenges of variability, robustness, and deployment in real-world BCI applications.

Contribution

It introduces a unified neural model with a graph adapter for electrode variability and multimodal training for noise robustness, advancing practical EEG-based MI decoding.

Findings

NeuroPath outperforms existing models on multiple datasets.

It maintains high accuracy across different electrode configurations.

The model demonstrates robustness under low-SNR conditions.

Abstract

Motor Imagery (MI) is an emerging Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) paradigm where a person imagines body movements without physical action. By decoding scalp-recorded electroencephalography (EEG) signals, BCIs establish direct communication to control external devices, offering significant potential in prosthetics, rehabilitation, and human-computer interaction. However, existing solutions remain difficult to deploy. (i) Most employ independent, opaque models for each MI task, lacking a unified architectural foundation. Consequently, these models are trained in isolation, failing to learn robust representations from diverse datasets, resulting in modest performance. (ii) They primarily adopt fixed sensor deployment, whereas real-world setups vary in electrode number and placement, causing models to fail across configurations. (iii) Performance degrades sharply under low-SNR conditions typical of consumer-grade EEG. To address these challenges, we present NeuroPath, a neural architecture for robust MI decoding. NeuroPath takes inspiration from the brain's signal pathway from cortex to scalp, utilizing a deep neural architecture with specialized modules for signal filtering, spatial representation learning, and feature classification, enabling unified decoding. To handle varying electrode configurations, we introduce a spatially aware graph adapter accommodating different electrode numbers and placements. To enhance robustness under low-SNR conditions, NeuroPath incorporates multimodal auxiliary training to refine EEG representations and stabilize performance on noisy real-world data. Evaluations on three consumer-grade and three medical-grade public datasets demonstrate that NeuroPath achieves superior performance.