A framework for motor imagery with LSTM neural network

Abstract

Background and objective: How to learn robust representations from brain activities and to improve algorithm performance are the most significant issues for brain-computer interface systems.

Methods: This study introduces a long short-term memory recurrent neural network to decode the multichannel electroencephalogram or electrocorticogram for implementing an effective motor imagery-based brain-computer interface system. The unique information processing mechanism of the long short-term memory network characterizes spatio-temporal dynamics in time sequences. This study evaluates the proposed method using publically available electroencephalogram/electrocorticogram datasets.

Results: The decoded features coupled with a gradient boosting classifier could obtain high recognition accuracies of 99% for electroencephalogram and 100% for electrocorticogram, respectively.

Conclusions: The results demonstrated that the proposed model can estimate robust spatial-temporal features and obtain significant performance improvement for motor imagery-based brain-computer interface systems. Further, the proposed method is of low computational complexity.

Keywords: Brain-computer interface (BCI); Long short-term memory (LSTM); Motor imagery (MI).