 Brain Connectivity for Motor Imagery and Executed Movement Task

Abstract

Movement is of great significance in our daily life for various purposes. The person with motor system malfunctioning may recover by the imagining the movement of the affected limb or via Brain-computer interface (BCI). A BCI system has an advantage of enabling the person to make specific movement without muscular activity. To design a BCI, it is necessary to have an understanding of brain connectivity for various movements. This paper presents the connectivity of the human brain for motor imagery and executed movement tasks. Publically available EEG Motor Movement/Imagery Database is used for observing brain connectivity for motor imagery and executed movement tasks (opening and closing of left or right fist). First and foremost, raw EEG is pre-processed to remove various artifacts. EEG Coherence is used to obtain functional connectivity within the human brain which reveals that strength of connectivity in primary motor cortex (M1) area in human brain is greater for movement execution rather than motor imagery. Besides, various features like variance, entropy, and energy were extracted over segmented data and fed to the classifier and it can be concluded that difference in connectivity for motor imagery and movement execution task in M1 area is more noticeable in subjects with higher accuracy as compared to subjects with lower accuracy.