International Journal of Neural Systems

The development of efficient stroke-detection methods is of significant importance in today's society due to the effects and impact of stroke on health and economy worldwide. This study focuses on Human Activity Recognition (HAR), which is a key component in developing an early stroke-diagnosis tool. An overview of the proposed global approach able to discriminate normal resting from stroke-related paralysis is detailed. The main contributions include an extension of the Genetic Fuzzy Finite State Machine (GFFSM) method and a new hybrid feature selection (FS) algorithm involving Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and a voting scheme putting the cross-validation results together. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is a well-performing HAR tool that can be successfully embedded in devices.

Artificial Neuron–Glia Networks (ANGNs) are a novel bio-inspired machine learning approach. They extend classical Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) by incorporating recent findings and suppositions about the way information is processed by neural and astrocytic networks in the most evolved living organisms. Although ANGNs are not a consolidated method, their performance against the traditional approach, i.e. without artificial astrocytes, was already demonstrated on classification problems. However, the corresponding learning algorithms developed so far strongly depends on a set of glial parameters which are manually tuned for each specific problem. As a consequence, previous experimental tests have to be done in order to determine an adequate set of values, making such manual parameter configuration time-consuming, error-prone, biased and problem dependent. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel learning approach for ANGNs that fully automates the learning process, and gives the possibility of testing any kind of reasonable parameter configuration for each specific problem. This new learning algorithm, based on coevolutionary genetic algorithms, is able to properly learn all the ANGNs parameters. Its performance is tested on five classification problems achieving significantly better results than ANGN and competitive results with ANN approaches.

Motor imagery-based brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) training has been proved to be an effective communication system between human brain and external devices. A practical problem in BCI-based systems is how to correctly and efficiently identify and extract subject-specific features from the blurred scalp electroencephalography (EEG) and translate those features into device commands in order to control external devices. In real BCI-based applications, we usually define frequency bands and channels configuration that related to brain activities beforehand. However, a steady configuration usually loses effects due to individual variability among different subjects in practical applications. In this study, a robust tensor-based method is proposed for a multiway discriminative subspace extraction from tensor-represented EEG data, which performs well in motor imagery EEG classification without the prior neurophysiologic knowledge like channels configuration and active frequency bands. Motor imagery EEG patterns in spatial-spectral-temporal domain are detected directly from the multidimensional EEG, which may provide insights to the underlying cortical activity patterns. Extensive experiment comparisons have been performed on a benchmark dataset from the famous BCI competition III as well as self-acquired data from healthy subjects and stroke patients. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method over the contemporary methods.

Current human-machine interfaces (HMIs) for users with severe disabilities often have difficulty distinguishing between intentional and inadvertent activations. Pre-movement neuro-cortical activity may aid in this elusive discrimination task but has not been exploited in HMIs. This work investigates the utility of the readiness potential (RP), a slow negative cortical potential preceding voluntary movement, for detecting the intention of self-initiated fine movements prior to their motoric realization. We recorded electroencephalography from the frontal, central, parietal and occipital lobes of 10 participants using a self-initiated switch activation protocol. Eye movement artifacts were removed by regression and the RP was detected on a single-trial basis, in a narrow frequency range (0.1–1 Hz). Common average reference was applied prior to windowed-averaging for feature extraction. Electrodes were selected according to a separability measure based on Fisher projection. Our findings demonstrate that feature fusion from an optimal number of electrodes achieves a statistically significant lower classification error than the best single classifier. Finally, voluntary fine movement intention was detected on a single-trial basis at above-chance levels approximately 396 ms before physical switch activation. These findings encourage the development of rapid-response, intention-aware HMIs for individuals with severe disabilities who struggle with executing voluntary fine motor movements.

For M/EEG-based distributed source imaging, it has been established that the L₂-norm-based methods are effective in imaging spatially extended sources, whereas the L₁-norm-based methods are more suited for estimating focal and sparse sources. However, when the spatial extents of the sources are unknown a priori, the rationale for using either type of methods is not adequately supported. Bayesian inference by exploiting the spatio-temporal information of the patch sources holds great promise as a tool for adaptive source imaging, but both computational and methodological limitations remain to be overcome. In this paper, based on state-space modeling of the M/EEG data, we propose a fully data-driven and scalable algorithm, termed STRAPS, for M/EEG patch source imaging on high-resolution cortices. Unlike the existing algorithms, the recursive penalized least squares (RPLS) procedure is employed to efficiently estimate the source activities as opposed to the computationally demanding Kalman filtering/smoothing. Furthermore, the coefficients of the multivariate autoregressive (MVAR) model characterizing the spatial-temporal dynamics of the patch sources are estimated in a principled manner via empirical Bayes. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate STRAPS's excellent performance in the estimation of locations, spatial extents and amplitudes of the patch sources with varying spatial extents.