Owen Falzon
brain-computer interfaces, common spatial patterns, elec-troencephalography, phase synchronization.
The interaction of distributed neuronal assemblies in the brain is thought to play a significant role during cogni- tive tasks. Various measures have been developed to quan- tify these interactions and a number of research groups have evaluated the usefulness of these measures in brain- computer interface (BCI) setups. In BCI systems these in- teraction measures have mainly been used to complement features representing other characteristics in the data. In this study we consider the combination of phase synchronization measures and features obtained from the method of common spatial patterns (CSP). The latter tech- nique, although widely adopted for BCIs, has never been considered in conjunction with phase synchronization mea- sures. For the phase synchronization features we make use of the phase synchronization based CSP (P-CSP) method. We thus carry out a number of tests on motor imagery EEG data to determine whether the combination of features from the two techniques can improve BCI performance. The re- sults from these experiments indicate that the combination of P-CSP features with features from the CSP technique does not yield any significant improvement in classifica- tion. Nevertheless, consistent phase synchronization pat- terns are obtained across subjects, indicating a common un- derlying synchronization process that emerges during the motor imagery tasks.
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