Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a non-invasive optical technique used for brain-computer interface (BCI). This study aims to investigate the brain hemodynamic responses of clench force and speed motor imagery and extract task-relevant features to obtain better classification performance. Given the non-stationary characteristics of real hemodynamic measurements, empirical mode decomposition (EMD) was applied to reduce the physiological noise overwhelmed in the task-relevant NIRS signals. Compared with continuous wavelet decomposition, EMD does not require a pre-determined basis function. EMD decomposes the original signals into a set of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). In this study, joint mutual information was applied to select the optimal features, and support vector machine was used as a classifier. Offline and pseudo-online analyses showed that the most feasible classification accuracy can be obtained using IMFs as input features. Accordingly, an alternative feature is provided to develop the NIRS-BCI system.

This research is published on Medical Engineering and Physics 37 (2015) 280–286 titled NIRS-based classification of clench force and speed motor imagery with the use of empirical mode decomposition for BCI.