Combining discriminant and topographic information in BCI: Preliminary results on stroke patients

Non-Invasive Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) convey a great potential in the field of stroke rehabilitation, where the continuous monitoring of mental tasks execution could support the positive effects of standard therapies. In this paper we combine time-frequency analysis of EEG with the topographic analysis to identify and track task-related patterns of brain activity emerging during a single BCI session. 6 Stroke patients executed Motor Imagery of the affected and unaffected hands: EEG sites were ranked depending on their discriminant power (DP) at different time instants and the resulting discriminant periods were used as a prior to extract EEG Microstates. Results show that the combination of these two techniques can provide insights about specific motor-related processes happening at a fine grain temporal resolution. Such events, represented by EEG microstates, can be tracked and used both to quantify changes of underlying neural structures and to provide feedback to patients and therapists.