A pulse artifact removal method considering artifact variations in the simultaneous recording of EEG and fMRI

A simultaneous recording of electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can provide high spatiotemporal information of brain activity. However, a proper analysis of the EEG signals is often hindered by various artifacts. In particular, pulse artifact (PA) induced from the heartbeat of a subject interferes with reliable measurements of the EEG signal. A new PA removal method that takes into account the delay variation between the heartbeat and PA and the window size variation in PA is presented in order to improve the detection and suppression of PA in EEG signals. A PA is classified into either a normal PA or a deformed PA. Only normal PAs are averaged to generate a PA template that is used to remove PAs from the measured EEG signals. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated by simulated data and real EEG measurements from epilepsy patients. The results are compared with those from conventional methods.     

基于小波奇异点检测和阈值去噪的眨眼伪迹去除方法

目的眨眼伪迹是脑电中一种常见且影响严重的伪迹。本论文提出一种基于小波奇异点检测和阈值去噪的眨眼伪迹去除方法,无需眼电参考信号,做到自动去除单导脑电信号中的眨眼伪迹。方法首先利用小波奇异点检测特性以检测眨眼伪迹的峰值位置,然后只对眨眼伪迹区域进行小波阈值去噪。结果实验结果表明,本方法能够有效检测眨眼伪迹,避免了普通方法去噪时对非眨眼区域的影响。结论本方法使用的阈值和阈值函数优于典型的阈值和软、硬阈值函数,有效地去除了脑电中的眨眼伪迹。     

A fully automatic ocular artifact suppression from EEG data using higher order statistics: Improved performance by wavelet analysis

Contamination of electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings with different kinds of artifacts is the main obstacle to the analysis of EEG data. Independent component analysis (ICA) is now a widely accepted tool for detection of artifacts in EEG data. One major challenge to artifact removal using ICA is the identification of the artifactual components. Although several strategies were proposed for automatically detecting the artifactual component during past several years, there is still little consensus on the criteria for automatic rejection of undesired components. In this paper we present a new identification procedure based on an efficient combination of independent component analysis (ICA), mutual information, and wavelet analysis for fully automatic ocular artifact suppression. The method does not require any offline training or determining the threshold levels for different markers. The results show that the proposed method could significantly enhance the ocular artifact detection and suppression. The results on 3105 4-s EEG epochs indicate that the artifact components can be identified with an accuracy of 97.8%, a sensitivity of 96.9%, and a specificity of 98.6%.     

Automatic Removal of Eye-Movement and Blink Artifacts from EEG Signals

Frequent occurrence of electrooculography (EOG) artifacts leads to serious problems in interpreting and analyzing the electroencephalogram (EEG). In this paper, a robust method is presented to automatically eliminate eye-movement and eye-blink artifacts from EEG signals. Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is used to decompose EEG signals into independent components. Moreover, the features of topographies and power spectral densities of those components are extracted to identify eye-movement artifact components, and a support vector machine (SVM) classifier is adopted because it has higher performance than several other classifiers. The classification results show that feature-extraction methods are unsuitable for identifying eye-blink artifact components, and then a novel peak detection algorithm of independent component (PDAIC) is proposed to identify eye-blink artifact components. Finally, the artifact removal method proposed here is evaluated by the comparisons of EEG data before and after artifact removal. The results indicate that the method proposed could remove EOG artifacts effectively from EEG signals with little distortion of the underlying brain signals.     

Accounting for microsaccadic artifacts in the EEG using independent component analysis and beamforming

Neuronal activity in the gamma‐band range was long considered a marker of object representation. However, scalp‐recorded EEG activity in this range is contaminated by a miniature saccade‐related muscle artifact. Independent component analysis (ICA) has been proposed as a method of removal of such artifacts. Alternatively, beamforming, a source analysis method in which potential sources of activity across the whole brain are scanned independently through the use of adaptive spatial filters, offers a promising method of accounting for the artifact without relying on its explicit removal. We present here the application of ICA‐based correction to a previously published dataset. Then, using beamforming, we examine the effect of ICA correction on the scalp‐recorded EEG signal and the extent to which genuine activity is recoverable before and after ICA correction. We find that beamforming attributes much of the scalp‐recorded gamma‐band signal before correction to deep frontal sources, likely the eye muscles, which generate the artifact related to each miniature saccade. Beamforming confirms that what is removed by ICA is predominantly this artifactual signal, and that what remains after correction plausibly originates in the visual cortex. Thus, beamforming allows researchers to confirm whether their removal procedures successfully removed the artifact. Our results demonstrate that ICA‐based correction brings about general improvements in signal‐to‐noise ratio suggesting it should be used along with, rather than be replaced by, beamforming.     

Validation of ICA as a tool to remove eye movement artifacts from EEG/ERP

Eye movement artifacts in electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings can greatly distort grand mean event‐related potential (ERP) waveforms. Different techniques have been suggested to remove these artifacts prior to ERP analysis. Independent component analysis (ICA) is suggested as an alternative method to “filter” eye movement artifacts out of the EEG, preserving the brain activity of interest and preserving all trials. However, the identification of artifact components is not always straightforward. Here, we compared eye movement artifact removal by ICA compiled on 10 s of EEG, on eye movement epochs, or on the complete EEG recording to the removal of eye movement artifacts by rejecting trials or by the Gratton and Coles method. ICA performed as well as the Gratton and Coles method. By selecting only eye movement epochs for ICA compilation, we were able to facilitate the identification of components representing eye movement artifacts.     

QRS artifact elimination on full night sleep EEG

Spectral analysis is now a standard procedure for analyzing the electroencephalograms (EEG) obtained by polysomnographic recordings. These numerical methods assume an artifact-free EEG since artifacts create spurious spectral components. Our aim was the development of a QRS artifact removal technique that might be applied to full night EEG with a minimal human intervention. This technique should handle one EEG channel, with or without use of one ECG channel. Variance minimization, independent component analysis (ICA), morphological filters (MF) have been implemented. Careful attention has been given to define the MF structuring element. The tests on artifact-simulated and real data were checked on the residual ECG spectral components present in the cleaned EEG. The best results are obtained by the MF when the structuring element is an artifact template defined either directly on the EEG or on the ICA ECG component. Further developments are required to identify and subtract the T-wave artifacts.     

Classification of independent components of EEG into multiple artifact classes

In this study, we aim to automatically identify multiple artifact types in EEG. We used multinomial regression to classify independent components of EEG data, selecting from 65 spatial, spectral, and temporal features of independent components using forward selection. The classifier identified neural and five nonneural types of components. Between subjects within studies, high classification performances were obtained. Between studies, however, classification was more difficult. For neural versus nonneural classifications, performance was on par with previous results obtained by others. We found that automatic separation of multiple artifact classes is possible with a small feature set. Our method can reduce manual workload and allow for the selective removal of artifact classes. Identifying artifacts during EEG recording may be used to instruct subjects to refrain from activity causing them.     

Detection of artifacts from high energy bursts in neonatal EEG

Detection of non-cerebral activities or artifacts, intermixed within the background EEG, is essential to discard them from subsequent pattern analysis. The problem is much harder in neonatal EEG, where the background EEG contains spikes, waves, and rapid fluctuations in amplitude and frequency. Existing artifact detection methods are mostly limited to detect only a subset of artifacts such as ocular, muscle or power line artifacts. Few methods integrate different modules, each for detection of one specific category of artifact. Furthermore, most of the reference approaches are implemented and tested on adult EEG recordings. Direct application of those methods on neonatal EEG causes performance deterioration, due to greater pattern variation and inherent complexity. A method for detection of a wide range of artifact categories in neonatal EEG is thus required. At the same time, the method should be specific enough to preserve the background EEG information. The current study describes a feature based classification approach to detect both repetitive (generated from ECG, EMG, pulse, respiration, etc.) and transient (generated from eye blinking, eye movement, patient movement, etc.) artifacts. It focuses on artifact detection within high energy burst patterns, instead of detecting artifacts within the complete background EEG with wide pattern variation. The objective is to find true burst patterns, which can later be used to identify the Burst-Suppression (BS) pattern, which is commonly observed during newborn seizure. Such selective artifact detection is proven to be more sensitive to artifacts and specific to bursts, compared to the existing artifact detection approaches applied on the complete background EEG. Several time domain, frequency domain, statistical features, and features generated by wavelet decomposition are analyzed to model the proposed bi-classification between burst and artifact segments. A feature selection method is also applied to select the feature subset producing highest classification accuracy. The suggested feature based classification method is executed using our recorded neonatal EEG dataset, consisting of burst and artifact segments. We obtain 78% sensitivity and 72% specificity as the accuracy measures. The accuracy obtained using the proposed method is found to be about 20% higher than that of the reference approaches. Joint use of the proposed method with our previous work on burst detection outperforms reference methods on simultaneous burst and artifact detection. As the proposed method supports detection of a wide range of artifact patterns, it can be improved to incorporate the detection of artifacts within other seizure patterns and background EEG information as well.     

Automatic removal of eye movement and blink artifacts from EEG data using blind component separation

Signals from eye movements and blinks can be orders of magnitude larger than brain-generated electrical potentials and are one of the main sources of artifacts in electroencephalographic (EEG) data. Rejecting contaminated trials causes substantial data loss, and restricting eye movements/blinks limits the experimental designs possible and may impact the cognitive processes under investigation. This article presents a method based on blind source separation (BSS) for automatic removal of electroocular artifacts from EEG data. BBS is a signal-processing methodology that includes independent component analysis (ICA). In contrast to previously explored ICA-based methods for artifact removal, this method is automated. Moreover, the BSS algorithm described herein can isolate correlated electroocular components with a high degree of accuracy. Although the focus is on eliminating ocular artifacts in EEG data, the approach can be extended to other sources of EEG contamination such as cardiac signals, environmental noise, and electrode drift, and adapted for use with magnetoencephalographic (MEG) data, a magnetic correlate of EEG.     

Removal of large muscle artifacts from transcranial magnetic stimulation-evoked EEG by independent component analysis

We present two techniques utilizing independent component analysis (ICA) to remove large muscle artifacts from transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)-evoked EEG signals. The first one is a novel semi-automatic technique, called enhanced deflation method (EDM). EDM is a modification of the deflation mode of the FastICA algorithm; with an enhanced independent component search, EDM is an effective tool for removing the large, spiky muscle artifacts. The second technique, called manual method (MaM) makes use of the symmetric mode of FastICA and the artifactual components are visually selected by the user. In order to evaluate the success of the artifact removal methods, four different quality parameters, based on curve comparison and frequency analysis, were studied. The dorsal premotor cortex (dPMC) and Broca’s area (BA) were stimulated with TMS. Both methods removed the very large muscle artifacts recorded after stimulation of these brain areas. However, EDM was more stable, less subjective, and thus also faster to use than MaM. Until now, examining lateral areas of the cortex with TMS—EEG has been restricted because of strong muscle artifacts. The methods described here can remove those muscle artifacts, allowing one to study lateral areas of the human brain, e.g., BA, with TMS—EEG.     

Removing electroencephalographic artifacts by blind source separation

Eye movements, eye blinks, cardiac signals, muscle noise, and line noise present serious problems for electroencephalographic (EEG) interpretation and analysis when rejecting contaminated EEG segments results in an unacceptable data loss. Many methods have been proposed to remove artifacts from EEG recordings, especially those arising from eye movements and blinks. Often regression in the time or frequency domain is performed on parallel EEG and electrooculographic (EOG) recordings to derive parameters characterizing the appearance and spread of EOG artifacts in the EEG channels. Because EEG and ocular activity mix bidirectionally, regressing out eye artifacts inevitably involves subtracting relevant EEG signals from each record as well. Regression methods become even more problematic when a good regressing channel is not available for each artifact source, as in the case of muscle artifacts. Use of principal component analysis (PCA) has been proposed to remove eye artifacts from multichannel EEG. However, PCA cannot completely separate eye artifacts from brain signals, especially when they have comparable amplitudes. Here, we propose a new and generally applicable method for removing a wide variety of artifacts from EEG records based on blind source separation by independent component analysis (ICA). Our results on EEG data collected from normal and autistic subjects show that ICA can effectively detect, separate, and remove contamination from a wide variety of artifactual sources in EEG records with results comparing favorably with those obtained using regression and PCA methods. ICA can also be used to analyze blink-related brain activity.     

Real-time ocular artifact suppression using recurrent neural network for electro-encephalogram based brain-computer interface

The paper presents an adaptive noise canceller (ANC) filter using an artificial neural network for real-time removal of electro-oculogram (EOG) interference from electro-encephalogram (EEG) signals. Conventional ANC filters are based on linear models of interference. Such linear models provide poorer prediction for biomedical signals. In this work, a recurrent neural network was employed for modelling the interference signals. The eye movement and eye blink artifacts were recorded by the placing of an electrode on the forehead above the left eye and an electrode on the left temple. The reference signal was then generated by the data collected from the forehead electrode being added to data recorded from the temple electrode. The reference signal was also contaminated by the EEG. To reduce the EEG interference, the reference signal was first low-pass filtered by a moving averaged filter and then applied to the ANC. Matlab Simulink was used for real-time data acquisition, filtering and ocular artifact suppression. Simulation results show the validity and effectiveness of the technique with different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of the primary signal. On average, a significant improvement in SNR up to 27 dB was achieved with the recurrent neural network. The results from real data demonstrate that the proposed scheme removes ocular artifacts from contaminated EEG signals and is suitable for real-time and short-time EEG recordings.     

Automatic correction of artifact from single-trial event-related potentials by blind source separation using second order statistics only

Event-related potentials (ERP) are in general masked by various kinds of artifacts. To attenuate the effects of artifacts, various schemes have been introduced, such as epoch rejection, electro-oculogram (EOG) regression and independent component analysis (ICA). However, none of the existing techniques can automatically remove various kinds of artifacts from a single ERP epoch. EOG regression cannot handle artifacts other than ocular ones. ICA incorporating higher order statistics (HOS) normally requires data with large number of time samples in order that the solution is robust. In this paper we blindly separate the multi-channel ERP into source components by estimating the correlation matrices of the data. Since only second order statistics (SOS) is involved, the process performs well at the single epoch level. Automatic artifact identification is performed in the source domain by introducing objective criteria for various artifacts. Criteria are based on time domain signal amplitude for blink and spurious peak artifact, scalp distribution of signal power for eye movement artifact and power distribution of frequency components for muscle artifact. The correction procedure can be completed by removing the identified artifactual sources from the raw multi-channel ERP.     

Using independent component analysis to remove artifact from electroencephalographic measured during stuttered speech

The electro-encephalographic (EEG) activity of people who stutter could provide invaluable information about the association of neural processing and stuttering. However, the EEG has never been adequately studied during speech in which stuttering naturally occurs. This is owing, in part, to the masking of the EEG signal by artifact from sources such as the speech musculature and from ocular activity. The aim of this paper was to demonstrate the ability of independent component analysis (ICA) to remove artifact from the EEG of stuttering children recorded while they are speaking and stuttering. The EEG of 16 male children who stuttered and 16 who did not stutter was recorded during a reading task. The recorded EEG that contained artifact was then subjected to ICA. The results demonstrated that the EEG assessed during stuttered speech had substantially more noise than the EEG of speech that did not contain stuttering (p<0.01). Furthermore, it was shown that ICA could effectively remove this artifact in all 16 children (p<0.01). The results from one child highlight the findings that ICA can be used to remove dominant artifact that has prevented the study of EEG activity during stuttered speech in children.     

ADJUST: An automatic EEG artifact detector based on the joint use of spatial and temporal features

A successful method for removing artifacts from electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings is Independent Component Analysis (ICA), but its implementation remains largely user‐dependent. Here, we propose a completely automatic algorithm (ADJUST) that identifies artifacted independent components by combining stereotyped artifact‐specific spatial and temporal features. Features were optimized to capture blinks, eye movements, and generic discontinuities on a feature selection dataset. Validation on a totally different EEG dataset shows that (1) ADJUST's classification of independent components largely matches a manual one by experts (agreement on 95.2% of the data variance), and (2) Removal of the artifacted components detected by ADJUST leads to neat reconstruction of visual and auditory event‐related potentials from heavily artifacted data. These results demonstrate that ADJUST provides a fast, efficient, and automatic way to use ICA for artifact removal.     

脑电信号伪迹去除的研究进展

脑电(EEG)是一种反映大脑活动的生物电信号,由于它具有很高的时变敏感性,在采集时极易受到外界的干扰.如眼球运动、眨眼、心电、肌电等都会给真实的脑电信号加入噪声(伪迹).这些噪声给脑电信号的分析处理带来了很大的困难.从剔除EEG中的各种伪迹到去除噪声的效果评估研究者们都提出了很多方法.本文回顾了近些年提出的去除各种脑电信号伪迹的方法,包括回归方法、伪迹减法、主成分分析、独立变量分析和小波变换等,同时总结了各种方法的应用前提及各自的优点和不足,并对脑电信号的伪迹去除方法进行了展望.＃     

Muscle artifacts in the sleep EEG: Automated detection and effect on all-night EEG power spectra

Owing to the use of scalp electrodes in human sleep recordings, cortical EEG signals are inevitably intermingled with the electrical activity of the muscle tissue on the skull. Muscle artifacts are characterized by surges in high frequency activity and are readily identified because of their outlying high values relative to the local background activity. To detect bursts of myogenic activity a simple algorithm is introduced that compares high frequency activity (26.25–32.0 Hz) in each 4-s epoch with the activity level in a local 3-min window. A 4-s value was considered artifactual if it exceeded the local background activity by a certain factor. Sensitivity and specificity of the artifact detection algorithm were empirically adjusted by applying different factors as artifact thresholds. In an analysis of sleep EEG signals recorded from 25 healthy young adults 2.3% (SEM: 0.16) of all 4-s epochs during sleep were identified as artifacts when a threshold factor of four was applied. Contamination of the EEG by muscle activity was more frequent towards the end of non-REM sleep episodes when EEG slow wave activity declined. Within and across REM sleep episodes muscle artifacts were evenly distributed. When the EEG signal was cleared of muscle artifacts, the all-night EEG power spectrum showed significant reductions in power density for all frequencies from 0.25–32.0 Hz. Between 15 and 32 Hz, muscle artifacts made up a substantial part (20–70%) of all-night EEG power density. It is concluded that elimination of short-lasting muscle artifacts reduces the confound between cortical and myogenic activity and is important in interpreting quantitative EEG data. Quantitative approaches in defining and detecting transient events in the EEG signal may help to determine which EEG phenomena constitute clinically significant arousals.     

A robust algorithm for removing artifacts in EEG recorded during FMRI/EEG study

The main purpose of this study was to propose a robust algorithm for removing artifacts from the electroencephalographic (EEG) data collected during magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The core idea of the proposed method was to remove the main gradient artifacts by the maximum cross-correlation method and to remove the residual artifacts by the rolling-ball algorithm and lowpass filtering. The results showed that the proposed algorithm had a better performance and was robust in the sense that its performance was maintained when the sampling rate of EEG data was decreased from 10KHz to 200Hz.     

基于典型相关分析和小波变换的眼龟伪迹去除

目的针对脑电信号中眼电伪迹去除尚存在的问题，提出一种基于典型相关分析与小波变换的（wavelet—enhanced canonical correlation analysis，wCCA）自动去除眼电伪迹的算法。方法首先，充分利用脑电信号和眼电伪迹的空间分布特征，将基于典型相关分析的盲源分离算法分别应用于左右脑区的混合信号中，从而保证典型相关分析分解得到的第一个典型相关变量（即左右脑区之间的最公共成分），就是眼电伪迹分量。然后为了恢复泄漏在该伪迹分量中的脑电成分，对伪迹分量进行小波阈值滤波，将高于某一阈值的小波系数置零，而保留低于阈值的系数。结果与其他三种基于盲源分离去除眼电伪迹的方法相比较，该方法在有效地自动去除眼电伪迹的同时，很好地保留了潜在的脑电信号，去除效果明显优于其他三种方法。结论由于该算法简单，处理速度较快，因此应用于实时的脑机接口系统中更具优越性，为后续脑电信号的特征提取和分类分析提供了良好的基础。