Removal of ballistocardiogram artifacts from simultaneously recorded EEG and fMRI data using independent component analysis

Simultaneous recording of electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been studied to identify areas related to EEG events. EEG data recorded in the magnetic resonance (MR) scanner with MR imaging is suffered from two specific artifacts, imaging artifact, and ballistocardiogram (BCG). In this paper, we focus on BCG. In preceding studies, average subtraction was often used for this purpose. However, average subtraction requires an assumption that BCG waveforms are precisely periodic, which seems unrealistic because BCG is a biomedical artifact. We propose the application of independent component analysis (ICA) with a postprocessing of high-pass filtering for the removal of BCG. With this approach, it is not necessary to assume that the BCG waveform is periodic. Empirically, we show that our proposed method removes BCG artifacts as well as does the average subtraction method. Power spectral density analysis of the two approaches shows that, with ICA, distortion of recovered EEG data is also as small as that associated with the average subtraction approach. We also propose a hypothesis for how head movement causes BCGs and show why ICA can remove BCG artifacts arising from this source.     

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。     

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.     

Integration of amplitude and phase statistics for complete artifact removal in independent components of neuromagnetic recordings

In magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG), independent component analysis is widely applied to separate brain signals from artifact components. A number of different methods have been proposed for the automatic or semiautomatic identification of artifact components. Most of the proposed methods are based on amplitude statistics of the decomposed MEG/EEG signal. We present a fully automated approach based on amplitude and phase statistics of decomposed MEG signals for the isolation of biological artifacts such as ocular, muscle, and cardiac artifacts (CAs). The performance of different artifact identification measures was investigated. In particular, we show that phase statistics is a robust and highly sensitive measure to identify strong and weak components that can be attributed to cardiac activity, whereas a combination of different measures is needed for the identification of artifacts caused by ocular and muscle activity. With the introduction of a rejection performance parameter, we are able to quantify the rejection quality for eye blinks and CAs. We demonstrate in a set of MEG data the good performance of the fully automated procedure for the removal of cardiac, ocular, and muscle artifacts. The new approach allows routine application to clinical measurements with small effect on the brain signal.      

基于独立分量分析的图像去噪研究

独立分量分析(independent component analysis,ICA)是基于信号高阶统计量的信号分析方法,它可以找到隐含在数据中的独立分量。在分析独立分量分析的基本模型及方法的基础上,讨论了有噪声信号的独立分量分析,使用最大似然估计对有噪声的ICA模型进行去噪处理,并研究了基于ICA的软门限图像去噪方法。在仿真实验中与其他的图像去噪方法进行了比较,突出了该方法在噪声方差较小时对非高斯信号的去噪优势。     

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.     

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.     

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...     

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.     

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.     

基于ICA的脑电信号P300少次自动提取

提出一种基于Infomax ICA少次自动提取脑电信号P300成分的方法.为了提高ICA分解的有效性,对原始数据中的自发脑电信号和P300成分进行了均衡.混合信号经过ICA分解后,根据IC的固定时间模式的标准差来自动选择P300成分IC,最后重构得到P300成分.实验结果是:利用6试次实验数据经过本文方法处理后能自动得到P300成分,与29试次平均结果(标准信号)相比,它们之间的Pearson相关系数达0.9035,而6试次实验数据平均的结果与标准信号之间的Pearson相关系数为0.5105.结果表明,该方法能有效的获取P300成分,同时增强了P300成分少次提取的客观性.     

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.     

基于图像独立特征分解的数字水印方法

独立分量分析(ICA)是在研究盲源分离过程中出现的一种全新的信号处理和数据分析方法。利用ICA方法,可以在不知源信号和传输通道的参数的情况下,根据输入源信号的统计特性,仅通过观测信号就能实时地恢复或提取源信号。该文把图像看成是多个独立的特征图像的混叠。利用独立分量分析方法同时对数字图像和水印图像进行独立特征分析,得到一种新的数字水印方法。计算机实验的结果表明这种方法加入的数字水印可以被恢复,并且具有一定的鲁棒性。     

Removal of the eye-blink artifacts from EEGs via STF-TS modeling and robust minimum variance beamforming

A novel scheme for the removal of eye-blink (EB) artifacts from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals based on a novel space-time-frequency (STF) model of EEGs and robust minimum variance beamformer (RMVB) is proposed. In this method, in order to remove the artifact, the RMVB is provided with a priori information, namely, an estimation of the steering vector corresponding to the point source EB artifact. The artifact-removed EEGs are subsequently reconstructed by deflation. The a priori knowledge, the vector corresponding to the spatial distribution of the EB factor, is identified using the STF model of EEGs, provided by the parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC) method. In order to reduce the computational complexity present in the estimation of the STF model using the three-way PARAFAC, the time domain is subdivided into a number of segments, and a four-way array is then set to estimate the STF-time/segment (TS) model of the data using the four-way PARAFAC. The correct number of the factors of the STF model is effectively estimated by using a novel core consistency diagnostic- (CORCONDIA-) based measure. Subsequently, the STF-TS model is shown to closely approximate the classic STF model, with significantly lower computational cost. The results confirm that the proposed algorithm effectively identifies and removes the EB artifact from raw EEG measurements.     

ICA去除EEG中眼动伪差和工频干扰方法研究

眼动伪差和工频干扰是临床脑电图(EEG)中常见噪声,严重影响其有用信息提取.本文尝试采用独立分量分析(Independent Component Analysis,ICA)方法分离EEG中此类噪声.通过对早老性痴呆症(Alzheimer disease,AD)患者临床EEG信号(含眼动伪差和混入工频干扰,信噪比仅0dB)作ICA分析,比较了最大熵(Infomax)和扩展最大熵(Extended Infomax)ICA算法的分离效果,证实虽然最大熵算法可以分离出眼动慢波,但难以消除工频干扰,为此需采用扩展的最大熵算法;并知ICA方法在极低信噪比时也有较好的抗干扰性,且在处理非平稳信号时有好的鲁棒性;文中还结合近似熵(approximate entropy,ApEn)分析说明利用ICA去除干扰后有助于恢复和保持原始EEG信号的非线性特征.研究结果表明ICA方法在生物医学信号处理中具有潜在的重要应用价值,值得深入研究和推广.     

Two Dimensional Spatial Independent Component Analysis and Its Application in fMRI Data Process

One important application of independent component analysis （ICA） is in image processing. A two dimensional （2-D） composite ICA algorithm framework for 2-D image independent component analysis （2-D ICA） is proposed. The 2-D nature of the algorithm provides it an advantage of circumventing the roundabout transforming procedures between two dimensional （2-D） image deta and one-dimensional （l-D） signal. Moreover the combination of the Newton （fixed-point algorithm） and natural gradient algorithms in this composite algorithm increases its efficiency and robustness. The convincing results of a successful example in functional magnetic resonance imaging （fMRI） show the potential application of composite 2-D ICA in the brain activity detection.     

Band expansion-based over-complete independent component analysis for multispectral processing of magnetic resonance images

Independent component analysis (ICA) has found great promise in magnetic resonance (MR) image analysis. Unfortunately, two key issues have been overlooked and not investigated. One is the lack of MR images to be used to unmix signal sources of interest. Another is the use of random initial projection vectors by ICA, which causes inconsistent results. In order to address the first issue, this paper introduces a band-expansion process (BEP) to generate an additional new set of images from the original MR images via nonlinear functions. These newly generated images are then combined with the original MR images to provide sufficient MR images for ICA analysis. In order to resolve the second issue, a prioritized ICA (PICA) is designed to rank the ICA-generated independent components (ICs) so that MR brain tissue substances can be unmixed and separated by different ICs in a prioritized order. Finally, BEP and PICA are combined to further develop a new ICA-based approach, referred to as PICA-BEP to perform MR image analysis.     

Multiclass common spatial patterns and information theoretic feature extraction

We address two shortcomings of the common spatial patterns (CSP) algorithm for spatial filtering in the context of brain--computer interfaces (BCIs) based on electroencephalography/magnetoencephalography (EEG/MEG): First, the question of optimality of CSP in terms of the minimal achievable classification error remains unsolved. Second, CSP has been initially proposed for two-class paradigms. Extensions to multiclass paradigms have been suggested, but are based on heuristics. We address these shortcomings in the framework of information theoretic feature extraction (ITFE). We show that for two-class paradigms, CSP maximizes an approximation of mutual information of extracted EEG/MEG components and class labels. This establishes a link between CSP and the minimal classification error. For multiclass paradigms, we point out that CSP by joint approximate diagonalization (JAD) is equivalent to independent component analysis (ICA), and provide a method to choose those independent components (ICs) that approximately maximize mutual information of ICs and class labels. This eliminates the need for heuristics in multiclass CSP, and allows incorporating prior class probabilities. The proposed method is applied to the dataset IIIa of the third BCI competition, and is shown to increase the mean classification accuracy by 23.4% in comparison to multiclass CSP.     

基于PCA和ICA的人脸识别

提出利用主成分分析(PCA)和独立成分分析(ICA)相结合的方法对人脸进行识别。首先对预处理后的图像进行降维,即利用PCA算法对图像进行去二阶相关和降维处理,然后再利用ICA算法获得人脸影像独立基成分,利用人脸影像独立基来构造一子空间,最后利用待识别图像在这个空间上的投影系数进行人脸识别。从两个不同的数据集,将传统的PCA人脸识别算法和提出的人脸识别算法进行比较。从实验数据结果看,提出的PCA和ICA结合人脸识别算法优于传统的PCA人脸识别算法。     

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.