Electrocorticographic interictal spike removal via denoising source separation for improved neuroprosthesis control

Electrocorticographic (ECoG) neuroprosthesis is a promising area of research that could provide channels of communication and control for patients who have lost their motor functions due to damage to the nervous system. However, implantation of subdural electrodes are clinically restricted to diagnostics of pre-surgical epileptic patients. Hence, interictal activity is present in the recordings across various areas of the sensorimotor cortex and suppresses the amplitude modulated features extracted to model hand trajectories. Denoising source separation is a recently introduced framework which extracts hidden structures of interest within the data through denoising the source estimates with filters designed around prior knowledge on the observations. Herein, we exploit the high amplitude quasiperiodic nature of the observed interictal spikes and show that removal of the interictal activity improves linear prediction of hand trajectories.