Background: Functional transcranial Doppler (fTCD) is an ultrasound based neuroimaging technique used to assess neural activation that occurs during a cognitive task through measuring velocity of cerebral blood flow.
New method: The objective of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of a 2-class and 3-class real-time BCI based on blood flow velocity in left and right middle cerebral arteries in response to mental rotation and word generation tasks. Statistical features based on a five-level wavelet decomposition were extracted from the fTCD signals. The Wilcoxon test and support vector machines (SVM), with a linear kernel, were employed for feature reduction and classification.
Results: The experimental results showed that within approximately 3s of the onset of the cognitive task average accuracies of 80.29%, and 82.35% were obtained for the mental rotation versus resting state and the word generation versus resting state respectively. The mental rotation task versus word generation task achieved an average accuracy of 79.72% within 2.24s from the onset of the cognitive task. Furthermore, an average accuracy of 65.27% was obtained for the 3-class problem within 4.68s.
Comparison with existing methods: The results presented here provide significant improvement compared to the relevant fTCD-based systems presented in literature in terms of accuracy and speed. Specifically, the reported speed in this manuscript is at least 12 and 2.5 times faster than any existing binary and 3-class fTCD-based BCIs, respectively.
Conclusions: These results show fTCD as a promising and viable candidate to be used towards developing a real-time BCI.
Keywords: Brain computer interfaces; Functional transcranial doppler; Neuroimaging; Support vector machines; Wavelet transform.
Published by Elsevier B.V.