This paper presents a hybrid brain-computer interface (BCI) control strategy,the goal of which is to expand control functions of a conventional motor imagery or a P300 potential based BCI in a virtual environment.The hybrid control strategy utilizes P300 potential to control virtual devices and motor imagery related sensorimotor rhythms to navigate in the virtual world.The two electroencephalography (EEG) patterns serve as source signals for different control functions in their corresponding system states,and state switch is achieved in a sequential manner.In the current system,imagination of left/right hand movement was translated into turning left/right in the virtual apartment continuously,while P300 potentials were mapped to discrete virtual device control commands using a five-oddball paradigm.The combination of motor imagery and P300 patterns in one BCI system for virtual environment control was tested and the results were compared with those of a single motor imagery or P300-based BCI.Subjects obtained similar performances in the hybrid and single control tasks,which indicates the hybrid control strategy works well in the virtual environment.
Brain-machine interface (BMI) has been developed due to its possibility to cure severe body paralysis. This technology has been used to realize the direct control of prosthetic devices,such as robot arms,computer cursors,and paralyzed muscles. A variety of neural decoding algorithms have been designed to explore relationships between neural activities and movements of the limbs. In this paper,two novel neural decoding methods based on probabilistic neural network (PNN) in rats were introduced,the PNN decoder and the modified PNN (MPNN) decoder. In the ex-periment,rats were trained to obtain water by pressing a lever over a pressure threshold. Microelectrode array was implanted in the motor cortex to record neural activity,and pressure was recorded by a pressure sensor synchronously. After training,the pressure values were estimated from the neural signals by PNN and MPNN decoders. Their per-formances were evaluated by a correlation coefficient (CC) and a mean square error (MSE). The results show that the MPNN decoder,with a CC of 0.8657 and an MSE of 0.2563,outperformed the traditionally-used Wiener filter (WF) and Kalman filter (KF) decoders. It was also observed that the discretization level did not affect the MPNN performance,indicating that the MPNN decoder can handle different tasks in BMI system,including the detection of movement states and estimation of continuous kinematic parameters.
Yi YUShao-min ZHANGHuai-jian ZHANGXiao-chun LIU Qiao-sheng ZHANGXiao-xiang ZHENGJian-hua DAI
