Development of electroencephalographic pattern classifiers for real and imaginary thumb and index finger movements of one hand

• Decoding accuracy of real and imaginary finger movements was explored by ANN and SVM.
• Real and imaginary movement of thumb/index fingers of one hand was used for decoding.
• The SVM was better for trial accumulation, ANN - for single-trial discrimination.
• Decoding of imagined movements through individual time intervals is promising for BCI.

ObjectiveThis study aimed to find effective approaches to electroencephalographic (EEG) signal analysis and resolve problems of real and imaginary finger movement pattern recognition and categorization for one hand.Methods and materialsEight right-handed subjects (mean age 32.8 [SD = 3.3] years) participated in the study, and activity from sensorimotor zones (central and contralateral to the movements/imagery) was recorded for EEG data analysis. In our study, we explored the decoding accuracy of EEG signals using real and imagined finger (thumb/index of one hand) movements using artificial neural network (ANN) and support vector machine (SVM) algorithms for future brain–computer interface (BCI) applications.ResultsThe decoding accuracy of the SVM based on a Gaussian radial basis function linearly increased with each trial accumulation (mean: 45%, max: 62% with 20 trial summarizations), and the decoding accuracy of the ANN was higher when single-trial discrimination was applied (mean: 38%, max: 42%). The chosen approaches of EEG signal discrimination demonstrated differential sensitivity to data accumulation. Additionally, the time responses varied across subjects and inside sessions but did not influence the discrimination accuracy of the algorithms.ConclusionThis work supports the feasibility of the approach, which is presumed suitable for one-hand finger movement (real and imaginary) decoding. These results could be applied in the elaboration of multiclass BCI systems.