Activation Modeling and Classification of Voluntary and Imagery Movements From the Prefrontal fNIRS Signals

The trends in movement-related functional activity measurement for brain-computer interface (BCI) are mostly associated with the central lobe of the brain. This consideration may be a faulty approach for the paralyzed patient. This limitation demands an alternative approach for movement-related BCI. For the first time, we propose the prefrontal hemodynamics for implementing movement-related BCI. This paper aims to model the activation pattern and the classification performances of the prefrontal hemodynamics regarding the movement-related events. Utilizing functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) the changes in the concentration of the oxidized hemoglobin and deoxidized hemoglobin regarding voluntary and imagery movements are acquired. With necessary preprocessing, the fNIRS signals are statistically analyzed to localize the most significant activated regions regarding the applied stimuli. The experiment shows that movement-related events have a strong correlation with the prefrontal hemodynamics. The patterns of the movement-related hemodynamics are modeled by polynomial regression and used to classify the voluntary and imagery events based on the maximum similarity approach. The resulting classification accuracies are found promising that proves the effectiveness of the prefrontal fNIRS signal to be effective in movement-related brain functionality analysis.