MASTER Assignment
Decoding Individual Contralateral and Ipsilateral Finger Movements from Electrocorticographic Signals Recorded over the Human Sensorimotor Cortex of a Single Hemisphere
Type : Master M-ITECH
Period: Jan, 2020- Dec, 2020
Student : Dijkstra, F.B. (Fabian, Student M-ITECH)
Date Final project: April 6, 2020
Supervisors:
Abstract:
This research handles the possibility to decode individual finger movements from both the hand contralateral to the implanted ECoG electrode grid as well as the hand ipsilateral to the implanted grid. The possibility to decode both ipsilateral and contralateral finger movements from a single hemisphere could increase the available degrees of freedom for device control. A synchronous (cue-based) experiment showed that individual movement of contralateral and ipsilateral fingers along with trials of rest can be decoded with a performance significantly above chance level (p<0.05) in four participants with an accuracy of 79.22% +/- 6.30 (Mean +/- SD) across participants. In addition to this synchronous experiment, an asynchronous experiment (non cue-based) was approximated such that it closely resembled a real-life BCI use case. In this experiment, the occurrence of false positive detections of especially ipsilateral finger movements was exacerbated, which has strong implications for the eventual usability of individual ipsilateral finger movement as a BCI control signal. Future research should focus on a more elaborate asynchronous evaluation and eventually experiments with end users should be performed to determine the full extent to which both contralateral and ipsilateral (attempted) finger movements can be used as a viable control signal in BCIs.