Continuous Decoding of Hand Movement From EEG Signals Using Phase-Based Connectivity Features

The principal goal of the brain-computer interface (BCI) is to translate brain signals into meaningful commands to control external devices or neuroprostheses to restore lost functions of patients with severe motor disabilities. The invasive recording of brain signals involves numerous health issues. Therefore, BCIs based on non-invasive recording modalities such as electroencephalography (EEG) are safer and more comfortable for the patients. The BCI requires reconstructing continuous movement parameters such as position or velocity for practical application of neuroprostheses. The BCI studies in continuous decoding have extensively relied on extracting features from the amplitude of brain signals, whereas the brain connectivity features have rarely been explored. This study aims to investigate the feasibility of using phase-based connectivity features in decoding continuous hand movements from EEG signals. To this end, the EEG data were collected from seven healthy subjects performing a 2D center-out hand movement task in four orthogonal directions. The phase-locking value (PLV) and magnitude-squared coherence (MSC) are exploited as connectivity features along with multiple linear regression (MLR) for decoding hand positions. A brute-force search approach is employed to find the best channel pairs for extracting features related to hand movements. The results reveal that the regression models based on PLV and MSC features achieve the average Pearson correlations of 0.43 ± 0.03 and 0.42 ± 0.06, respectively, between predicted and actual trajectories over all subjects. The delta and alpha band features have the most contribution in regression analysis. The results also demonstrate that both PLV and MSC decoding models lead to superior results on our data compared to two recently proposed feature extraction methods solely based on the amplitude or phase of recording signals (p < 0.05). This study verifies the ability of PLV and MSC features in the continuous decoding of hand movements with linear regression. Thus, our findings suggest that extracting features based on brain connectivity can improve the accuracy of trajectory decoder BCIs.