Classification algorithm for motor imagery fusing CNN and attentional mechanisms based on functional near-infrared...

With the continuing development of brain-computer interface technology, the analysis and interpretation of brain signals are becoming increasingly important. In the field of brain-computer interfaces, motor imagery (MI) is an important paradigm for generating specific brain signals through thought alone, rather than actual movement, for computer decoding. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) imaging technology has been increasingly used in brain-computer interfaces due to its advantages of non-invasiveness, low resource requirements, low cost, and high spatial resolution. Scientists have done a lot of work in channel selection, feature selection, and then applying traditional machine learning methods for classification, but the results achieved so far are still insufficient to meet the conditions for realizing fNIRS brain-computer interfaces. To achieve a higher level of classification of fNIRS signals, we propose a method that fuses CNN and attention mechanisms to analyze the near-infrared signals of motor imagery and mental arithmetic data, which is fed into a neural network by deriving signals of changes in oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO) and deoxygenated hemoglobin (HbR) concentrations through the modified Beer-Lambert law, and then applied to the fNIRS dataset of 29 healthy subjects to validate the proposed method. In the fNIRS-based BCI, the average classification accuracy of the MI signal from HbR and HbO reaches 85.92% and 86.21%, respectively, and the average classification accuracy of the MA signal reaches 89.66% and 88.79%, respectively. The advantage of our approach is that it is lightweight and improves the classification accuracy of current BCI fNIRS signals.