@article {3418, title = {Identifying the Attended Speaker Using Electrocorticographic (ECoG) Signals.}, journal = {Journal of Neural Engineering}, year = {2015}, abstract = {People affected by severe neuro-degenerative diseases (e.g., late-stage amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or locked-in syndrome) eventually lose all muscular control. Thus, they cannot use traditional assistive communication devices that depend on muscle control, or brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that depend on the ability to control gaze. While auditory and tactile BCIs can provide communication to such individuals, their use typically entails an artificial mapping between the stimulus and the communication intent. This makes these BCIs difficult to learn and use. In this study, we investigated the use of selective auditory attention to natural speech as an avenue for BCI communication. In this approach, the user communicates by directing his/her attention to one of two simultaneously presented speakers. We used electrocorticographic (ECoG) signals in the gamma band (70{\textendash}170 Hz) to infer the identity of attended speaker, thereby removing the need to learn such an artificial mapping. Our results from twelve human subjects show that a single cortical location over superior temporal gyrus or pre-motor cortex is typically sufficient to identify the attended speaker within 10 s and with 77\% accuracy (50\% accuracy due to chance). These results lay the groundwork for future studies that may determine the real-time performance of BCIs based on selective auditory attention to speech.}, keywords = {auditory attention, Brain-computer interface (BCI), Cocktail Party, electrocorticography (ECoG)}, doi = {10.1080/2326263X.2015.1063363}, url = {https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4776341/}, author = {Dijkstra, K. and Peter Brunner and Gunduz, Aysegul and Coon, W.G. and A L Ritaccio and Farquhar, Jason and Gerwin Schalk} } @article {2861, title = {Interactions Between Pre-Processing and Classification Methods for Event-Related-Potential Classification : Best-Practice Guidelines for Brain-Computer Interfacing.}, journal = {Neuroinformatics}, year = {2013}, month = {04/2013}, abstract = {Detecting event related potentials (ERPs) from single trials is critical to the operation of many stimulus-driven brain computer interface (BCI) systems. The low strength of the ERP signal compared to the noise (due to artifacts and BCI irrelevant brain processes) makes this a challenging signal detection problem. Previous work has tended to focus on how best to detect a single ERP type (such as the visual oddball response). However, the underlying ERP detection problem is essentially the same regardless of stimulus modality (e.g. visual or tactile), ERP component (e.g. P300 oddball response, or the error-potential), measurement system or electrode layout. To investigate whether a single ERP detection method might work for a wider range of ERP BCIs we compare detection performance over a large corpus of more than 50 ERP BCI datasets whilst systematically varying the electrode montage, spectral filter, spatial filter and classifier training methods. We identify an interesting interaction between spatial whitening and regularised classification which made detection performance independent of the choice of spectral filter low-pass frequency. Our results show that pipeline consisting of spectral filtering, spatial whitening, and regularised classification gives near maximal performance in all cases. Importantly, this pipeline is simple to implement and completely automatic with no expert feature selection or parameter tuning required. Thus, we recommend this combination as a "best-practice" method for ERP detection problems.}, keywords = {BCI, decoding, EEG, ERP, LDA, spatial filtering, spectral filtering}, issn = {1559-0089}, doi = {10.1007/s12021-012-9171-0}, url = {http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23250668}, author = {Farquhar, Jason and Jeremy Jeremy Hill} } @article {2133, title = {A graphical model framework for decoding in the visual ERP-based BCI speller.}, journal = {Neural Comput}, volume = {23}, year = {2011}, month = {01/2011}, pages = {160-82}, abstract = {

We present a graphical model framework for decoding in the visual ERP-based speller system. The proposed framework allows researchers to build generative models from which the decoding rules are obtained in a straightforward manner. We suggest two models for generating\ brain\ signals conditioned on the stimulus events. Both models incorporate letter frequency information but assume different dependencies between\ brain\ signals and stimulus events. For both models, we derive decoding rules and perform a discriminative training. We show on real visual speller data how decoding performance improves by incorporating letter frequency information and using a more realistic graphical model for the dependencies between the\ brain\ signals and the stimulus events. Furthermore, we discuss how the standard approach to decoding can be seen as a special case of the graphical model framework. The letter also gives more insight into the discriminative approach for decoding in the visual speller system.

}, keywords = {Artificial Intelligence, Computer User Training, Discrimination Learning, Electroencephalography, Evoked Potentials, Evoked Potentials, Visual, Humans, Language, Models, Neurological, Models, Theoretical, Reading, Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted, User-Computer Interface, Visual Cortex, Visual Perception}, issn = {1530-888X}, doi = {10.1162/NECO_a_00066}, url = {http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20964540}, author = {Martens, S M M and Mooij, J M and Jeremy Jeremy Hill and Farquhar, Jason and Sch{\"o}lkopf, B} } @article {2136, title = {Overlap and refractory effects in a brain-computer interface speller based on the visual P300 event-related potential.}, journal = {J Neural Eng}, volume = {6}, year = {2009}, month = {04/2009}, pages = {026003}, abstract = {

We reveal the presence of refractory and overlap effects in the event-related potentials in visual P300 speller datasets, and we show their negative impact on the performance of the system. This finding has important implications for how to encode the letters that can be selected for communication. However, we show that such effects are dependent on stimulus parameters: an alternative stimulus type based on apparent motion suffers less from the refractory effects and leads to an improved letter prediction performance.

}, keywords = {Algorithms, Brain, Cognition, Computer Simulation, Electroencephalography, Event-Related Potentials, P300, Humans, Models, Neurological, Pattern Recognition, Automated, Photic Stimulation, Semantics, Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted, Task Performance and Analysis, User-Computer Interface, Writing}, issn = {1741-2552}, doi = {10.1088/1741-2560/6/2/026003}, url = {http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19255462}, author = {Martens, S M M and Jeremy Jeremy Hill and Farquhar, Jason and Sch{\"o}lkopf, B} } @article {2142, title = {Optimizing Spatial Filters for BCI: Margin- and Evidence-Maximization Approaches.}, year = {2006}, month = {11/2006}, abstract = {

We present easy-to-use alternatives to the often-used two-stage Common Spatial Pattern + classifier approach for spatial filtering and classification of Event-Related Desynchronization signals in BCI. We report two algorithms that aim to optimize the spatial filters according to a criterion more directly related to the ability of the algorithms to generalize to unseen data. Both are based upon the idea of treating the spatial filter coefficients as hyperparameters of a kernel or covariance function. We then optimize these hyper-parameters directly along side the normal classifier parameters with respect to our chosen learning objective function. The two objectives considered are margin maximization as used in Support-Vector Machines and the evidence maximization framework used in Gaussian Processes. Our experiments assessed generalization error as a function of the number of training points used, on 9 BCI competition data sets and 5 offline motor imagery data sets measured in Tubingen. Both our approaches sho w consistent improvements relative to the commonly used CSP+linear classifier combination. Strikingly, the improvement is most significant in the higher noise cases, when either few trails are used for training, or with the most poorly performing subjects. This a reversal of the usual "rich get richer" effect in the development of CSP extensions, which tend to perform best when the signal is strong enough to accurately find their additional parameters. This makes our approach particularly suitable for clinical application where high levels of noise are to be expected.

}, keywords = {Brain Computer Interfaces}, url = {http://www.researchgate.net/publication/237615110_Optimizing_Spatial_Filters_for_BCI}, author = {Farquhar, Jason and Jeremy Jeremy Hill and Sch{\"o}lkopf, B} } @article {2140, title = {Regularised CSP for Sensor Selection in BCI.}, year = {2006}, month = {01/2006}, abstract = {

The Common Spatial Pattern (CSP) algorithm is a highly successful method for efficiently calculating spatial filters for brain signal classification. Spatial filtering can improve classification performance considerably, but demands that a large number of electrodes be mounted, which is inconvenient in day-to-day BCI usage. The CSP algorithm is also known for its tendency to overfit, i.e. to learn the noise in the training set rather than the signal. Both problems motivate an approach in which spatial filters are sparsified. We briefly sketch a reformulation of the problem which allows us to do this, using 1-norm regularisation. Focusing on the electrode selection issue, we present preliminary results on EEG data sets that suggest that effective spatial filters may be computed with as few as 10{\textendash}20 electrodes, hence offering the potential to simplify the practical realisation of BCI systems significantly.

}, url = {http://edoc.mpg.de/312060}, author = {Farquhar, Jason and Jeremy Jeremy Hill and Lal, T.N and Sch{\"o}lkopf, B} } @article {2141, title = {Time-Dependent Demixing of Task-Relevant EEG Signals.}, year = {2006}, month = {09/2006}, abstract = {

Given a spatial filtering algorithm that has allowed us to identify task-relevant EEG sources, we present a simple approach for monitoring the activity of these sources while remaining relatively robust to changes in other (task-irrelevant) brain activity. The idea is to keep spatial *patterns* fixed rather than spatial filters, when transferring from training to test sessions or from one time window to another. We show that a fixed spatial pattern (FSP) approach, using a moving-window estimate of signal covariances, can be more robust to non-stationarity than a fixed spatial filter (FSF) approach.

}, url = {http://edoc.mpg.de/312053}, author = {Jeremy Jeremy Hill and Farquhar, Jason and Lal, T.N and Sch{\"o}lkopf, B} }