A robust beamforming approach for early detection of readiness potential with application to brain-computer interface systems

Early detection of intention to move, at self-paced voluntary movements from the activities of neural current sources on the motor cortex, can be an effective approach to brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. Achieving high sensitivity and pre-movement negative latency are important issues for increasing the speed of BCI and other rehabilitation and neurofeedback systems used by disabled and stroke patients and helps enhance their movement abilities. Therefore, developing high-performance extractors or beamformers is a necessary task in this regard. In this paper, for the sake of improving the beamforming performance in well reconstruction of sources of readiness potential, related to hand movement, one kind of surface spatial filter (spherical spline derivative on electrode space) and the linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) beamformer are utilized jointly. Moreover, in order to achieve better results, the real head model of each subject was created, using individual head MRI, and was used in beamformer algorithm. Also, few optimizations were done on reconstructed source signal powers to help our template matching classifier with detection of movement onset for five healthy subjects. Our classification results show an average true positive rate (TPR) of 77.1% and 73.1%, false positive rate (FPR) of 28.96% and 28.74% and latency of -512.426 ±396. 7ms and - 360.29 ±252. 16 ms from signals of current sources of motor cortex and sensor space respectively. It can be seen that the proposed method has reliable sensitivity and is faster in prediction of movement onset and more reliable to be used for online BCI in future.