Artifact removal in magnetoencephalogram background activity with independent component analysis

The aim of this study was to assess whether independent component analysis (ICA) could be valuable to remove power line noise, cardiac, and ocular artifacts from magnetoencephalogram (MEG) background activity. The MEGs were recorded from 11 subjects with a 148-channel whole-head magnetometer. We used a statistical criterion to estimate the number of independent components. Then, a robust ICA algorithm decomposed the MEG epochs and several methods were applied to detect those artifacts. The whole process had been previously tested on synthetic data. We found that the line noise components could be easily detected by their frequency spectrum. In addition, the ocular artifacts could be identified by their frequency characteristics and scalp topography. Moreover, the cardiac artifact was better recognized by its skewness value than by its kurtosis one. Finally, the MEG signals were compared before and after artifact rejection to evaluate our method.     

Origin of the radio frequency pulse artifact in simultaneous EEG-fMRI recording: rectification at the carbon-metal interface

Simultaneous electroencephalograph-functional magnetic resonance imaging (EEG-fMRI) recording has become an important tool for investigating spatiotemporal properties of brain events, such as epilepsy, evoked brain responses, and changes in brain rhythms. Reduction of noise in EEG signals during fMRI recording is crucial for acquiring high-quality EEG-fMRI data. The main source of the noise includes the gradient artifact, the radio frequency (RF) pulse artifact, and the cardiac pulse artifact. Since the RF pulse artifact is relatively small in amplitude, little attention has been paid to this artifact, and its origin is not well understood. However, the amplitude of the RF pulse artifact fluctuates randomly even if a very high EEG sampling rate is used, making it more salient than the gradient artifact after postprocessing for noise removal. In this paper, we investigate the cause of the RF pulse artifact in EEG systems that use carbon wires.     

基于独立向量分析的脑电信号中肌电伪迹的去除方法

脑电数据经常被各种电生理信号伪迹所污染。在常见伪迹中,肌电伪迹特别难以去除。文献中最常用的方法包括诸如独立分量分析(Independent Component Analysis, ICA)和典型相关分析(Canonical Correlation Analysis, CCA)等盲源分离技术。该文首次提出一种基于独立向量分析(Independent Vector Analysis, IVA)的新方法,用以去除脑电中的肌电伪迹。IVA同时使用高阶统计量和二阶统计量,因此该方法能够充分利用肌电伪迹的非高斯性和弱相关性,兼具ICA方法和CCA方法的优势。实验表明,使用IVA方法可以在保留脑电成份的同时极大抑制肌电伪迹,效果显著优于ICA法和CCA法。     

Independent component approach to the analysis of EEG and MEG recordings

Multichannel recordings of the electromagnetic fields emerging from neural currents in the brain generate large amounts of data. Suitable feature extraction methods are, therefore, useful to facilitate the representation and interpretation of the data. Recently developed independent component analysis (ICA) has been shown to be an efficient tool for artifact identification and extraction from electroencephalographic (EEG) and magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recordings. In addition, ICA has been applied to the analysis of brain signals evoked by sensory stimuli. This paper reviews our recent results in this field.     

Employing spatially constrained ICA and wavelet denoising, for automatic removal of artifacts from multichannel EEG data

Detecting artifacts produced in electroencephalographic (EEG) data by muscle activity, eye blinks and electrical noise, etc., is an important problem in EEG signal processing research. These artifacts must be corrected before further analysis because it renders subsequent analysis very error-prone. One solution is to reject the data segment if artifact is present during the observation interval, however, the rejected data segment could contain important information masked by the artifact. The independent component analysis (ICA) can be an effective and applicable method for EEG denoising. The goal of this paper is to propose a framework, based on ICA and wavelet denoising (WD), to improve the pre-processing of EEG signals. In particular we employ concept of the spatially constrained ICA (SCICA) to extract artifact-only independent components (ICs) from the given EEG data, use WD to remove any cerebral activity from the extracted-artifacts ICs, and finally project back the artifacts to be subtracted from EEG signals to get clean EEG data. The main advantage of the proposed approach is faster computation, as it is not necessary to identify all ICs. Computer experiments are carried out, which demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed approach in removing focal artifacts that can be well separated by SCICA.     

脑电信号预处理方法研究综述

脑电信号是一种复杂且重要的生物信号,被广泛应用于类脑智能技术和脑机接口领域的研究。文中介绍了干扰正常脑电信号的常见非生理性伪迹和生理性伪迹的类型及特点,并对生理性伪迹的产生原因进行了详细分析。通过对各种脑电信号去除伪迹方法的回顾以及应用现状的分析,比较并总结了传统去除伪迹方法和新型去除伪迹方法的研究进展,并进一步分析去除伪迹方法的优缺点。部分方法已经成功应用于处理脑电信号中的眼电、心电和肌电等伪迹中。文中还针对目前脑电信号去除伪迹的需求及所面临的问题给出了应对策略,并对未来的研究方向进行了分析和展望。     

Modeling common dynamics in multichannel signals with applications to artifact and background removal in EEG recordings

Removing artifacts and background electroencephaloraphy (EEG) from multichannel interictal and ictal EEG has become a major research topic in EEG signal processing in recent years. We applied for this purpose a recently developed subspace-based method for modeling the common dynamics in multichannel signals. When the epileptiform activity is common in the majority of channels and the artifacts appear only in a few channels the proposed method can be used to remove the latter. The performance of the method was tested on simulated data for different noise levels. For high noise levels the method was still able to identify the common dynamics. In addition, the method was applied to real life EEG recordings containing interictal and ictal activity contaminated with muscle artifact. The muscle artifacts were removed successfully. For both the synthetic data and the analyzed real life data the results were compared with the results obtained with principal component analysis (PCA). In both cases, the proposed method performed better than PCA.     

Cardiac artifact subspace identification and elimination in cognitive MEG data using time-delayed decorrelation

To reduce physiological artifacts in magnetoencephalographic (MEG) and electroencephalographic recordings, a number of methods have been applied in the past such as principal component analysis, signal-space projection, regression using secondary information, and independent component analysis. This method has become popular as it does not have constraints such as orthogonality between artifact and signal or the need for a priori information. Applying the time-delayed decorrelation algorithm to raw data from a visual stimulation MEG experiment, we show that several of the independent components can be attributed to the cardiac artifact. Calculating an average cardiac activity shows that physiologically different excitation states of the heart produce similar field distributions in the MEG sensor system. This is equivalent to differing spectral properties of cardiac field distributions in the raw data. As a consequence, the algorithm combines, e.g., the R peak and the T wave of the cardiac cycle into a single component and the one-to-one assignment of each independent component with a physiological source is not justified in this case. To improve the signal quality of visually evoked fields, the multidimensional cardiac artifact subspace is suppressed from the data. To assess the preservation of the evoked signal after artifact suppression, a geometrical and a temporal measure are introduced. The suppression of cardiac and alpha wave artifacts allows, in our experimental setting, the reduction of the number of epochs to one half while preserving the visually evoked signal.     

Classification of artifactual EEG signal and detection of multiple eye movement artifact zones using novel Time-amplitude algorithm

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signal has numerous applications in the field of medical science. It is used to diagnose many of the abnormalities, disorders, and diseases related to the human brain. The EEG signal contaminated with ocular artifacts makes it very difficult for analysis and diagnosis. This paper includes work on classification of artifactual/non-artifactual EEG time series and perfect detection of eye movement (EM) artifact contaminated EEG signal along with multiple EM artifactual zones in the same time series. Artificial Neural Network classifier in a simple perceptron model without hidden layer is used for the identification. This study presents a newly developed, simple, robust, and computationally fast statistical Time-Amplitude algorithm. By the application of novel Time-Amplitude algorithm on identified signal, the EM artifactual EEG signal along with multiple zones is automatically detected and marked accurately. Such robust, efficient, real-time and simple algorithm is not ever designed and used for ocular artifact detection by any author. The ROC analysis gives accuracy of the ANN model for classifying the presence of artifacts in the EEG data, which is 97.50 %. The time elapsed for executing the Time-Amplitude algorithm for automatic detection of EM artifact is very less (4.30 msec.) compared to DWT with Haar. It has the capability to detect multiple EM artifactual zones, in the same time, for the montage of 8-second EEG.     

Enhanced ${mu }$ Rhythm Extraction Using Blind Source Separation and Wavelet Transform

The mu rhythm is an electroencephalogram (EEG) signal located at the central region of the brain that is frequently used for studies concerning motor activity. Quite often, the EEG data are contaminated with artifacts and the application of blind source separation (BSS) alone is insufficient to extract the mu rhythm component. We present a new two-stage approach to extract the mu rhythm component. The first stage uses second-order blind identification (SOBI) with stationary wavelet transform (SWT) to automatically remove the artifacts. In the second stage, SOBI is applied again to find the mu rhythm component. Our method is first compared with independent component analysis with discrete wavelet transform (ICA-DWT) as well as SOBI-DWT, ICA-SWT, and regression method for artifact removal using simulated EEG data. The results showed that the regression method is more effective in removing electrooculogram (EOG) artifacts, while SOBI-SWT is more effective in removing electromyogram (EMG) artifacts as compared to the other artifact removal methods. Then, all the methods are compared with the direct application of SOBI in extracting mu rhythm components on simulated and actual EEG data from ten subjects. The results showed that the proposed method of SOBI-SWT artifact removal enhances the extraction of the mu rhythm component.     

一种基于局部密度的自适应眼电伪迹去除方法

脑电信号幅值微弱且信噪比低易受到多种伪迹影响.其中,眼电伪迹幅值高、随机性强,常使脑电信号产生明显畸变,对信号的后续分析将产生极大的影响.传统伪迹去除方法难以精确定位伪迹成分,导致过多有效信息丢失.针对上述问题,该文提出一种基于数据驱动的自适应伪迹定位和去除方法.该方法将局部密度引入独立成分分析(ICA)并通过聚类分析...     

A model-based objective evaluation of eye movement correction in EEG recordings

We present a method to quantitatively and objectively compare algorithms for correction of eye movement artifacts in a simulated ongoing electroencephalographic signal (EEG). A realistic model of the human head is used, together with eye tracker data, to generate a data set in which potentials of ocular and cerebral origin are simulated. This approach bypasses the common problem of brain-potential contaminated electro-oculographic signals (EOGs), when monitoring or simulating eye movements. The data are simulated for five different EEG electrode configurations combined with four different EOG electrode configurations. In order to objectively compare correction performance for six algorithms, listed in Table III, we determine the signal to noise ratio of the EEG before and after artifact correction. A score indicating correction performance is derived, and for each EEG configuration the optimal correction algorithm and the optimal number of EOG electrodes are determined. In general, the second-order blind identification correction algorithm in combination with 6 EOG electrodes performs best for all EEG configurations evaluated on the simulated data.     

脑电信号中眼电伪迹自动去除方法的研究

 针对实际采集的脑电信号受眼电干扰较大,提出一种基于离散小波变换(DWT)与独立分量分析(ICA)的自动去除眼电伪迹的方法(DWICA).对采集的多导脑电和眼电信号进行离散小波变换,获取多尺度小波系数,将串接小波系数作为ICA的输入;利用基于负熵判据的FastICA算法实现独立成分的快速获取,引入夹角余弦准则自动识别眼迹成分,并经过ICA逆变换将剔除眼迹后的独立成分投影返回到原脑电信号各个电极;通过DWT逆变换重构信号,即可得到去除眼迹的各导脑电信号.实验结果表明,DWICA方法极大地提高了脑电信号的信噪比,抗噪能力强且实时性好,为脑电信号的在线预处理提供了新思路.     

Identification and elimination of cardiac contribution insingle-trial magnetoencephalographic signals

A two-step method for identification and elimination of the cardiac contribution in single-trial magnetoencephalographic (MEG) signals is proposed. In the first step, the mean interfering signal (MIS) in one period is estimated by QRS-synchronous averaging of the raw MEG data. In the second step, a QRS-synchronous segmentation of the MEG signals is performed and each signal segment is Gram-Schmidt orthogonalized with the MIS. The above method is applied both to artificial and real MEG data. In each case the heart interference is all but eliminated whereas the components of interest, generated by the brain, remain almost unaffected     

Nonlinear Regularized Wiener Filtering With Kernels: Application in Denoising MEG Data Corrupted by ECG

Magnetoencephalographic and electroencephalographic recordings are often contaminated by artifacts such as eye movements, blinks, and cardiac or muscle activity. These artifacts, whose amplitude may exceed that of brain signals, may severely interfere with the detection and analysis of events of interest. In this paper, we consider a nonlinear approach for cardiac artifacts removal from magnetoencephalographic data, based on Wiener filtering. In recent works, nonlinear Wiener filtering based on reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces and the kernel trick has been proposed. However, the filter parameters are determined by the resolution of a linear system which may be ill conditioned. To deal with this problem, we introduce three kernel methods that provide powerful tools for solving ill-conditioned problems, namely, kernel principal component analysis, kernel partial least squares, and kernel ridge regression. A common feature of these methods is that they regularize the solution by assuming an appropriate prior on the class of possible solutions. We avoid the use of QRS-synchronous averaging techniques, which may induce distortions in brain signals if artifacts are not well detected. Moreover, our approach shows the nonlinear relation between magnetoencephalographic and electrocardiographic signals     

Enhancement of phase clustering in the EEG/MEG gamma frequency band anticipates transitions to paroxysmal epileptiform activity in epileptic patients with known visual sensitivity

A new analytical method for quantifying brain activity from magnetoelectroencephalogram (MEG) and electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings during periodic light stimulation is proposed. It consists in estimating the phase clustering of harmonically related frequency components of a subject's MEG/EEG responses evoked by the light stimulation. The method was developed to test the hypothesis that changes in the dynamics of brain systems in the course of intermittent photic stimulation (IPS) may precede the transition to seizure activity in photosensitive patients. We assumed that such changes would be reflected in the phase of harmonic components of the evoked responses. Thus, we determined the phase clustering for different harmonic components of these MEG/EEG signals. We found that the patients who develop epileptiform discharges during IPS present an enhancement of the phase clustering index at the gamma frequency band, compared with that at the driving frequency. We introduce a quantity--relative phase clustering index (rPCI)--by means of which this enhancement can be quantified. We argue that this quantity reflects the degree of excitability of the underlying dynamical system and it can indicate presence of nonlinear dynamics. rPCI can be applied to detect transitions to epileptic seizure activity in patients with known sensitivity to IPS.     

Temporally constrained ICA: an application to artifact rejection in electromagnetic brain signal analysis

Independent component analysis (ICA) is a technique which extracts statistically independent components from a set of measured signals. The technique enjoys numerous applications in biomedical signal analysis in the literature, especially in the analysis of electromagnetic (EM) brain signals. Standard implementations of ICA are restrictive mainly due to the square mixing assumption-for signal recordings which have large numbers of channels, the large number of resulting extracted sources makes the subsequent analysis laborious and highly subjective. There are many instances in neurophysiological analysis where there is strong a priori information about the signals being sought; temporally constrained ICA (cICA) can extract signals that are statistically independent, yet which are constrained to be similar to some reference signal which can incorporate such a priori information. We demonstrate this method on a synthetic dataset and on a number of artifactual waveforms identified in multichannel recordings of EEG and MEG. cICA repeatedly converges to the desired component within a few iterations and subjective analysis shows the waveforms to be of the expected morphologies and with realistic spatial distributions. This paper shows that cICA can be applied with great success to EM brain signal analysis, with an initial application in automating artifact extraction in EEG and MEG.     

基于变分模态分解的癫痫脑电信号分类方法

癫痫是一种常见的脑部疾病,通过脑电图能非侵入地定位人脑中的致痫区域.为了辨别病灶性和非病灶性癫痫脑电信号,文章提出一种基于变分模态分解的癫痫脑电信号自动检测方法,首先将原信号分割成多个子信号,并对各子信号进行变分模态分解,然后从分解后的不同变分模态函数中提取精细复合多尺度散布熵和精细复合多尺度模糊熵两个特征并利用支持向量机进行分类.针对癫痫脑电的公共数据集,最终的实验结果表明,准确率、灵敏度和特异度三个性能指标分别达到94.24%,95.58%和90.64%,ROC曲线下面积达0.978.     

基于Hilbert-Huang变换的思维脑电分类技术研究

研究基于Hilbert-Huang变换的思维脑电分类方法.对思维脑电信号进行Hilbert-Huang时频预处理,经经验模式分解后,得到多阶固有模态分量.然后将经HHT变换后的时频窗口内的振幅标准差作为不同心理作业信号特征,再应用K-近邻对思维脑电信号进行分类决策.通过对Colorado州立大学EEG研究中心的三类思维脑电心理作业样本进行分类,平均正确率达到82.54%.经Hilbert-Huang变换得到的脑电信号特征,可以作为思维脑电分类的有效依据.     

Removal of BCG Artifacts Using a Non-Kirchhoffian Overcomplete Representation

We present a nonlinear unmixing approach for extracting the ballistocardiogram (BCG) from EEG recorded in an MR scanner during simultaneous acquisition of functional MRI (fMRI). First, an overcomplete basis is identified in the EEG based on a custom multipath EEG electrode cap. Next, the overcomplete basis is used to infer non-Kirchhoffian latent variables that are not consistent with a conservative electric field. Neural activity is strictly Kirchhoffian while the BCG artifact is not, and the representation can hence be used to remove the artifacts from the data in a way that does not attenuate the neural signals needed for optimal single-trial classification performance. We compare our method to more standard methods for BCG removal, namely independent component analysis and optimal basis sets, by looking at single-trial classification performance for an auditory oddball experiment. We show that our overcomplete representation method for removing BCG artifacts results in better single-trial classification performance compared to the conventional approaches, indicating that the derived neural activity in this representation retains the complex information in the trial-to-trial variability.