Independent component analysis techniques and their performance evaluation for electroencephalography.

The ongoing electrical activity of the brain is known as the electroencephalogram (EEG). Evoked potentials (EPs) are voltage deviations in the EEG elicited in association with stimuli. EPs provide clinical information by allowing an insight into neurological processes. The amplitude of EPs is typically several times less than the background EEG. The background EEG has the effect of obscuring the EPs and therefore appropriate signal processing is required for their recovery. The EEG waveforms recorded from electrodes placed on the scalp contains the ongoing background EEG, EPs from various brain sources as well as signal components with sources external to the brain. An example of externally generated signal which is picked up by the electrodes on the scalp is the electrooculogram (EOG). This signal is generated by the eyes when eye movements or blinks are performed. Saccade-related EEG waveforms were recorded from 7 normal subjects. A signal source separation technique, namely the independent component analysis (ICA) algorithm of Bell and Sejnowski (hereafter refereed to as BS_ICA), was employed to analyse the recorded waveforms. The effectiveness of the BS_ICA algorithm as well as that of the ICA algorithm of Cardoso, was investigated for removing ocular artefact (OA) from the EEG. It was quantitavely demonstrated that both ICA algorithms were more effective than the conventional correlation-based techniques for removing the OA from the EEG.A novel iterative synchronised averaging method for EPs was devised. The method optimally synchronised the waveforms from successive trials with respect to the event of interest prior to averaging and thus preserved the features of the signals components that were time-locked to the event. The recorded EEG waveforms were analysed using BS_ICA and saccade-related components (frontal and occipital pre-saccadic potentials, and the lambda wave) were extracted and their scalp topographies were obtained. This initial study highlighted some limitations of the conventional ICA approach of Bell and Sejnowski for analysing saccade-related EEG waveforms.Novel techniques were devised in order to improve the performance of the ICA algorithm of Bell and Sejnowski for extracting the lambda wave EP component. One approach involved designing a template-model that represented the temporal characteristics of a lambda wave. Its incorporation into the BS_ICA algorithm improved the signal source separation ability of the algorithm for extracting the lambda wave from the EEG waveforms. The second approach increased the effective length of the recorded EEG traces prior to their processing by the BS_ICA algorithm. This involved abutting EEG traces from an appropriate number of successive trials (a trial was a set of waveforms recorded from 64 electrode locations in a experiment involving a saccade performance). It was quantitatively demonstrated that the process of abutting EEG waveforms was a valuable pre-processing operation for the ICA algorithm of Bell and Sejnowski when extracting the lambda wave.A Fuzzy logic method was implemented to identify BS_ICA-extracted single-trial saccade-related lambda waves. The method provided an effective means to automate the identification of the lambda waves extracted by BS_ICA. The approach correctly identified the single-trial lambda waves with an Accuracy of 97.4%.