Motor-Imagery-Based Brain-Computer Interface Using Signal Derivation and Aggregation Functions

Brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies are popular methods of communication between the human brain and external devices. One of the most popular approaches to BCI is motor imagery (MI). In BCI applications, the electroencephalography (EEG) is a very popular measurement for brain dynamics because of its noninvasive nature. Although there is a high interest in the BCI topic, the performance of existing systems is still far from ideal, due to the difficulty of performing pattern recognition tasks in EEG signals. This difficulty lies in the selection of the correct EEG channels, the signal-to-noise ratio of these signals, and how to discern the redundant information among them. BCI systems are composed of a wide range of components that perform signal preprocessing, feature extraction, and decision making. In this article, we define a new BCI framework, called enhanced fusion framework, where we propose three different ideas to improve the existing MI-based BCI frameworks. First, we include an additional preprocessing step of the signal: a differentiation of the EEG signal that makes it time invariant. Second, we add an additional frequency band as a feature for the system: the sensorimotor rhythm band, and we show its effect on the performance of the system. Finally, we make a profound study of how to make the final decision in the system. We propose the usage of both up to six types of different classifiers and a wide range of aggregation functions (including classical aggregations, Choquet and Sugeno integrals, and their extensions and overlap functions) to fuse the information given by the considered classifiers. We have tested this new system on a dataset of 20 volunteers performing MI-based brain-computer interface experiments. On this dataset, the new system achieved 88.80% accuracy. We also propose an optimized version of our system that is able to obtain up to 90.76%. Furthermore, we find that the pair Choquet/Sugeno integrals and overlap functions are the ones providing the best results.