Asymmetric hemisphere modeling in an offline brain-computer interface

Classification of the electroencephalogram (EEG) during motor imagery of the left or right hand can be performed using a classifier comprising two hidden Markov models (HMMs) describing the spatio-temporal patterns related to the imagination. Due to the known asymmetries during motor imagery of rightand left-hand movement, an HMM-based classifier allowing asymmetrical structures is introduced. The comparison between such a system and a symmetrical one is based on the error rate of classification. The results for EEG data collected during 20 sessions from five subjects demonstrate a significant improvement of 9% for the classification accuracy for the asymmetric classifiers. The selection of the DAM for classification is done using a variant of genetic algorithms (GAs); namely, the adaptive reservoir genetic algorithm (ARGA).