Using brain connectivity metrics from synchrostates to perform motor imagery classification in EEG-based BCI systems

Phase synchronisation between different neural groups is considered an important source of information to understand the underlying mechanisms of brain cognition. This Letter investigated phase-synchronisation patterns from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals recorded from ten healthy participants performing motor imagery (MI) tasks using schematic emotional faces as stimuli. These phase-synchronised states, named synchrostates, are specific for each cognitive task performed by the user. The maximum and minimum number of occurrence states were selected for each subject and task to extract the connectivity network measures based on graph theory to feed a set of classification algorithms. Two MI tasks were successfully classified with the highest accuracy of 85% with corresponding sensitivity and specificity of 85%. In this work, not only the performance of different supervised learning techniques was studied, as well as the optimal subset of features to obtain the best discrimination rates. The robustness of this classification method for MI tasks indicates the possibility of expanding its use for online classification of the brain-computer interface (BCI) systems.