A Motor Imagery Signals Classification Method via the Difference of EEG Signals Between Left and Right Hemispheric Electrodes

Brain-computer interface (BCI) based on motor imagery (MI) can help patients with limb movement disorders in their normal life. In order to develop an efficient BCI system, it is necessary to decode high-accuracy motion intention by electroencephalogram (EEG) with low signal-to-noise ratio. In this article, a MI classification approach is proposed, combining the difference in EEG signals between the left and right hemispheric electrodes with a dual convolutional neural network (dual-CNN), which effectively improved the decoding performance of BCI. The positive and inverse problems of EEG were solved by the boundary element method (BEM) and weighted minimum norm estimation (WMNE), and then the scalp signals were mapped to the cortex layer. We created nine pairs of new electrodes on the cortex as the region of interest. The time series of the nine electrodes on the left and right hemispheric are respectively used as the input of the dual-CNN model to classify four MI tasks. The results show that this method has good results in both group-level subjects and individual subjects. On the Physionet database, the averaged accuracy on group-level can reach 96.36%, while the accuracies of four MI tasks reach 98.54, 95.02, 93.66, and 96.19%, respectively. As for the individual subject, the highest accuracy is 98.88%, and its four MI accuracies are 99.62, 99.68, 98.47, and 97.73%, respectively.