Modeling of movement-related potentials using a fractal approach

In bio-signal applications, classification performance depends greatly on feature extraction, which is also the case for electroencephalogram (EEG) based applications. Feature extraction, and consequently classification of EEG signals is not an easy task due to their inherent low signal-to-noise ratios and artifacts. EEG signals can be treated as the output of a non-linear dynamical (chaotic) system in the human brain and therefore they can be modeled by their dimension values. In this study, the variance fractal dimension technique is suggested for the modeling of movement-related potentials (MRPs). Experimental data sets consist of EEG signals recorded during the movements of right foot up, lip pursing and a simultaneous execution of these two tasks. The experimental results and performance tests show that the proposed modeling method can efficiently be applied to MRPs especially in the binary approached brain computer interface applications aiming to assist severely disabled people such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients in communication and/or controlling devices.