I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

Brain-computer interfaces for communication and control.

The brain's electrical signals enable people without muscle control to physically interact with the world.

Brain-computer interfaces for communication and control

This brief review examines some of the methods used to infer central control strategies from surface electromyogram (EMG) recordings. Among the many uses of the surface EMG in studying the neural control of movement, the review critically evaluates only some of the applications. The focus is on the relations between global features of the surface EMG and the underlying physiological processes. Because direct measurements of motor unit activation are not available and many factors can influence the signal, these relations are frequently misinterpreted. These errors are compounded by the counterintuitive effects that some system parameters can have on the EMG signal. The phenomenon of crosstalk is used as an example of these problems. The review describes the limitations of techniques used to infer the level of muscle activation, the type of motor unit recruited, the upper limit of motor unit recruitment, the average discharge rate, and the degree of synchronization between motor units. Although the global surface EMG is a useful measure of muscle activation and assessment, there are limits to the information that can be extracted from this signal.

The extraction of neural strategies from the surface EMG

Objective Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) enable direct communication with a computer, using neural activity as the control signal. This neural signal is generally chosen from a variety of well-studied electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. For a given BCI paradigm, feature extractors and classifiers are tailored to the distinct characteristics of its expected EEG control signal, limiting its application to that specific signal. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have been used in computer vision and speech recognition to perform automatic feature extraction and classification, have successfully been applied to EEG-based BCIs; however, they have mainly been applied to single BCI paradigms and thus it remains unclear how these architectures generalize to other paradigms. Here, we ask if we can design a single CNN architecture to accurately classify EEG signals from different BCI paradigms, while simultaneously being as compact as possible. Approach In this work we introduce EEGNet, a compact convolutional neural network for EEG-based BCIs. We introduce the use of depthwise and separable convolutions to construct an EEG-specific model which encapsulates well-known EEG feature extraction concepts for BCI. We compare EEGNet, both for within-subject and cross-subject classification, to current state-of-the-art approaches across four BCI paradigms: P300 visual-evoked potentials, error-related negativity responses (ERN), movement-related cortical potentials (MRCP), and sensory motor rhythms (SMR). Main results We show that EEGNet generalizes across paradigms better than, and achieves comparably high performance to, the reference algorithms when only limited training data is available across all tested paradigms. In addition, we demonstrate three different approaches to visualize the contents of a trained EEGNet model to enable interpretation of the learned features. Significance Our results suggest that EEGNet is robust enough to learn a wide variety of interpretable features over a range of BCI tasks. Our models can be found at: https://github.com/vlawhern/arl-eegmodels.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-2552/aace8c/pdf

EEGNet: a compact convolutional neural network for EEG-based brain–computer interfaces

A brain-computer interface (BCI) is a system for direct communication between brain and computer. The BCI developed in this work is based on a BCI described by Farwell and Donchin in 1988, which allows a subject to communicate one of 36 symbols presented on a 6 /spl times/ 6 matrix. The system exploits the P300 component of event-related brain potentials (ERP) as a medium for communication. The processing methods distinguish this work from Donchin's work. In this work, independent component analysis (ICA) was used to separate the P300 source from the background noise. A matched filter was used together with averaging and threshold techniques for detecting the existence of P300s. The processing method was evaluated offline on data recorded from six healthy subjects. The method achieved a communication rate of 5.45 symbols/min with an accuracy of 92.1% compared to 4.8 symbols/min with an accuracy of 90% in Donchin's work. The online interface was tested with the same six subjects. The average communication rate achieved was 4.5 symbols/min with an accuracy of 79.5% as apposed to the 4.8 symbols/min with an accuracy of 56% in Donchin's work. The presented BCI achieves excellent performance compared to other existing BCIs, and allows a reasonable communication rate, while maintaining a low error rate.

An improved P300-based brain-computer interface

Hand amputees would highly benefit from a robotic prosthesis, which would allow the movement of a number of fingers. In this paper we propose using the electromyographic signals recorded by two pairs of electrodes placed over the arm for operating such prosthesis. Multiple features from these signals are extracted whence the most relevant features are selected by a genetic algorithm as inputs for a simple classifier. This method results in a probability of error of less than 2%.

/pdf/classification-of-finger-activation-for-use-in-a-robotic-55uwd1gxfm.pdf

Classification of finger activation for use in a robotic prosthesis arm

The following is an investigation of the ability of the autoregressive (AR) model to describe the spectrum of the processes underlying the recorded surface EMG. Surface EMG (SEMG) spectrum is influenced by two major factors; one attributed to the motor units (MU) firing rate and the second, the higher frequency one, to the morphology of the action potentials (AP) traveling along the muscle fiber. In the present paper, SEMG measurements were carried out on the biceps brachii muscle with fixed surface electrodes arrangement and isotonic conditions. Sufficient averaging of 0.5 s segments enabled the identification of the low-frequency peak related to the firing rates of the MU's.

Autoregressive Modeling of Surface EMG and Its Spectrum with Application to Fatigue

Classification of movement-related potentials recorded from the scalp to their corresponding limb is a crucial task in brain-computer interfaces based on such potentials. Many features can be extracted from raw electroencephalographic signals to be used for classification, but the utilization of irrelevant or superfluous features is detrimental to the performance of classification algorithms. It is, therefore, necessary to select a small number of relevant features for the classification task. This paper demonstrates the use of two feature selection methods to choose a small number (10-20) of relevant features from a bank containing upward of 1000 features. One method is based on information theory and the other on the use of genetic algorithms. We show that the former is poorly suited for the aforementioned classification task and discuss the probable reasons for this. However, using a genetic algorithm on data recorded from five subjects we demonstrate that it is possible to differentiate between the movements of two limbs with a classification accuracy of 87% using as little as 10 features without subject training. With the addition of a simple coding scheme, this method can be applied to multiple limb classification and a 63% classification accuracy rate can be reached when attempting to distinguish between three limbs.

Feature selection for the classification of movements from single movement-related potentials

Surface EMG was recorded from the biceps with fixed muscle length at S0 percent maximal voluntary contraction. The signal bandpass was 10-230 Hz where most of the surface EMG energy is located. The signal sampled at 500 Hz was found to have a changing spectrum. Stationary segments of 500 ms were subject to linear prediction mathematics to model the system.

Gideon F. Inbar

Papers

An improved P300-based brain-computer interface

Classification of finger activation for use in a robotic prosthesis arm

Autoregressive Modeling of Surface EMG and Its Spectrum with Application to Fatigue

Feature selection for the classification of movements from single movement-related potentials

On Surface EMG Spectral Characterization and Its Application to Diagnostic Classification