Evidence of Variabilities in EEG Dynamics During Motor Imagery-Based Multiclass Brain–Computer Interface

Inter-subject and inter-session variabilities pose a significant challenge in electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. Furthermore, high dimensional EEG montages introduce huge computational burden due to excessive number of channels involved. Two experimental, i.e., inter-session and inter-subject, variabilities of EEG dynamics during motor imagery (MI) tasks are investigated in this paper. In particular, the effect on the performance of the BCIs due to day-to-day variability in EEG dynamics during the alterations in cognitive stages is explored. In addition, the inter-subject BCIs feasibility between cortically synchronized and desynchronized subject pairs on pairwise performance associativity is further examined. Moreover, the consequences of integrating spatial brain dynamics of varying the number of channels - from specific regions of the brain - are also discussed in case of both the contexts. The proposed approach is validated on real BCI data set containing EEG data from four classes of MI tasks, i.e., left/right hand, both feet, and tongue, subjected prior to a preprocessing of three different spatial filtering techniques. Experimental results have shown that a maximum classification accuracy of around 58% was achieved for the inter-subject experimental case, whereas a 31% deviation was noticed in the classification accuracies across two sessions during the inter-session experimental case. In conclusion, BCIs, without the subject-and session-specific calibration and with lesser number of channels employed, play a vital role while promoting a generic and efficient framework for plug and play use.