Motor imagery brain functional connectivity analysis via coherence

Abstract

Performance of motor imagery (MI)-based brain computer interfaces (BCIs) highly depends on the extraction of features from different brain neural processes. Commonly designed BCIs use band power changes in single channel electroencephalograms (EEGs) to discriminate different MI tasks. In this paper, we studied the information about interactions of spatially separated brain areas by considering the relationships between brain source signals through functional connectivity. We investigated dynamic time-frequency connectivity patterns during four motor imagery movements including left hand, right hand, both feet and tongue by means of Coherence measure estimated from multivariate adaptive autoregressive model coefficients. To tackle the volume conduction problem, sensor space signals were transformed into source space using independent component analysis technique. We showed distinct time-varying Coherence for different motor imageries. For tongue MI movement, bilateral connectivity was observed in hand areas of both hemispheres. The similar connectivity was detected for feet MI task, but with more focus on right hemisphere. During right and left hand MI, bilateral and contralateral brain connectivities were observed respectively. Results provided valuable information for possible classification of MI tasks by considering brain source functional connectivity patterns for BCIs.