Is Event-Related Desynchronization variability correlated with BCI performance?

Despite current research, the relationship between the variability of Event-Related Desynchronization (ERD) generated during Motor Imagery (MI) tasks and MI-BCI performances is still not well understood. Indeed, numerous studies have previously shown that there is a lot of inter-subject and intra-subject variability in ERD patterns, but difficulties remain to understand the origin of such variability. This lack of knowledge about variability of cerebral motor patterns limits the possibilities of improving the performance of BCIs, which remains quite poor on average. We believe that a better understanding of the variability of ERDs during BCI use is crucial for developing effective interfaces. Indeed, analysis of intertrial ERDs and their variability throughout the experimental session during MI are largely neglected in most studies, which have mainly focused on identifying ERD patterns averaged across trial and possibly across participants. In this study, we propose to analyze large MI-BCI databases (n=75 subjects) and investigate how the inter/intra-individual variability of the cerebral motor patterns underlying the right-hand and left-hand MIs task (i.e., ERDs) is associated to BCI performance. Our study revealed that although ERD amplitude and baseline power are correlated with BCI performances, variability of ERD amplitude or baseline power are not.