How Does a Single EEG Channel Tell Us About Brain States in Brain-Computer Interfaces ?

Abstract: Over recent decades, neuroimaging tools, particularly electroencephalography (EEG), have revolutionized our understanding of the brain and its functions. EEG is extensively used in traditional brain-computer interface (BCI) systems due to its low cost, non-invasiveness, and high temporal resolution. This makes it invaluable for identifying different brain states relevant to both medical and non-medical applications. Although this practice is widely recognized, current methods are mainly confined to lab or clinical environments because they rely on data from multiple EEG electrodes covering the entire head. Nonetheless, a significant advancement for these applications would be their adaptation for "real-world" use, using portable devices with a single-channel. In this study, we tackle this challenge through two distinct strategies: the first approach involves training models with data from multiple channels and then testing new trials on data from a single channel individually. The second method focuses on training with data from a single channel and then testing the performances of the models on data from all the other channels individually. To efficiently classify cognitive tasks from EEG data, we propose Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with only a few parameters and fast learnable spectral-temporal features. We demonstrated the feasibility of these approaches on EEG data recorded during mental arithmetic and motor imagery tasks from three datasets. We achieved the highest accuracies of 100%, 91.55% and 73.45% in binary and 3-class classification on specific channels across three datasets. This study can contribute to the development of single-channel BCI and provides a robust EEG biomarker for brain states classification.