Cortical discrimination of natural vibration stimulation in rats for a BMI task

Sensory information, such as the tactile or proprioceptive signals, helps motor brain-machine interface (mBMI) work more naturally. Before applying sensory feedback, we need to explore if the neural activities are discriminative to different stimuli during a BMI task. Previous studies on the cortical discrimination are mainly focused on the rat whisker system. In this paper, we design a BMI task, where the freely behaving rat needs to maintain its position by poking a hole to receive the vibration stimulation on forepaws. Neural signals are collected synchronously from the corresponding sensory cortex when the rat is performing the task. Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm is implemented to evaluate the single trial classification of natural stimulus by neural ensembles. We find that the average classification accuracy reaches 80% over 3 rats, which suggests the vibration with different frequencies can be used as tactile feedback to the mBMI system.