Effects of transcranial direct current stimulation on the motor-imagery brain-computer interface for stroke recovery: An EEG source-space study

Recently, noninvasive brain stimulation is gaining significant attention in stroke rehabilitation. In this paper, we investigate the effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on the motor-imagery brain-computer interface (MI-BCI) performance of stroke patients. To this end, we processed the EEG data collected from a randomized control trial (RCT) study of 19 stroke patients grouped into tDCS and sham. An ensemble method for feature extraction is proposed in this study that combines shrinkage regularized Common Spatial Pattern (CSP) features from the sensor-space and the cortical source-space Electroencephalography (EEG) across ten rehabilitation sessions. The classification results of MI vs. Idle state in stroke patients show that the concatenated features from both the sensor- and source space EEG provided an average cross-validation accuracy of 64.5% which is statistically significant (p < 0.001) compared to either using source or sensor-space features. Further, our findings suggest that the effect of tDCS on the stroke recovery is pronounced in subjects whose delta and alpha band power during the post-tDCS intervention is significantly higher as compared to before intervention. The group-averaged sLORETA activation results showed a significantly higher number of dipoles activated in the tDCS group as compared to sham. In summary, our study paves a new way to analyze the neural correlates of the MI-BCI performance for stroke rehabilitation.

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