A Low-rank Spatiotemporal based EEG Multi-Artifacts Cancellation Method for Enhanced ConvNet-DL's Motor Imagery Characterization.

Multi-channel Electroencephalograph (EEG) signal is an important source of neural information for motor imagery (MI) limb movement intent decoding. The decoded MI movement intent often serve as potential control input for brain-computer interface (BCI) based rehabilitation robots. However, the presence of multiple dynamic artifacts in EEG signal leads to serious processing challenge that affects the BCI system in practical settings. Hence, this study propose a hybrid approach based on Low-rank spatiotemporal filtering technique for concurrent elimination of multiple EEG artifacts. Afterwards, a convolutional neural network based deep learning model (ConvNet-DL) that extracts neural information from the cleaned EEG signal for MI tasks decoding was built. The proposed method was studied in comparison with existing artifact removal methods using EEG signals of transhumeral amputees who performed five different MI tasks. Remarkably, the proposed method led to significant improvements in MI task decoding accuracy for the ConvNet-DL model in the range of 8.00~13.98%, while up to 14.38% increment was recorded in terms of the MCC: Mathew correlation coefficients at p<0.05. Also, a signal to error ratio of more than 11 dB was recorded by the proposed method.Clinical Relevance- This study showed that a combination of the proposed hybrid EEG artifact removal method and ConvNet-DL can significantly improve the decoding accuracy of MI upper limb movement tasks. Our findings may provide potential control input for BCI rehabilitation robotic systems.