Transcranial direct current stimulation and EEG-based motor imagery BCI for upper limb stroke rehabilitation

Clinical studies had shown that EEG-based motor imagery Brain-Computer Interface (MI-BCI) combined with robotic feedback is effective in upper limb stroke rehabilitation, and transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) combined with other rehabilitation techniques further enhanced the facilitating effect of tDCS. This motivated the current clinical study to investigate the effects of combining tDCS with MI-BCI and robotic feedback compared to sham-tDCS for upper limb stroke rehabilitation. The stroke patients recruited were randomized to receive 20 minutes of tDCS or sham-tDCS prior to 10 sessions of 1-hour MI-BCI with robotic feedback for 2 weeks. The online accuracies of detecting motor imagery from idle condition were assessed and offline accuracies of classifying motor imagery from background rest condition were assessed from the EEG of the evaluation and therapy parts of the 10 rehabilitation sessions respectively. The results showed no evident differences between the online accuracies on the evaluation part from both groups, but the offline analysis on the therapy part yielded higher averaged accuracies for subjects who received tDCS (n=3) compared to sham-tDCS (n=2). The results suggest towards tDCS effect in modulating motor imagery in stroke, but a more conclusive result can be drawn when more data are collected in the ongoing study.