title: A dynamic stopping method for improving performance of steady-state visual evoked potential based brain-computer interfaces.
abstract: The performance of steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) has been drastically improved in the past few years. In conventional SSVEP-based BCIs, the speed of a selection is fixed towards high performance based on preliminary offline analysis. However, due to inter-trial variability, the optimal selection time to achieve sufficient accuracy is different for each trial. To optimize the performance of SSVEP-based BCIs, this study proposed a dynamic stopping method that can adaptively determine a selection time in each trial by applying a threshold to the probability of detecting a target. A 12-class SSVEP dataset recorded from 10 subjects was used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Compared to the conventional method with a fixed selection time towards the highest accuracy, the proposed method could significantly reduce the averaged selection time (0.84±0.39 s vs. 1.44±0.63 s, p<;0.05) with comparable accuracy (99.44±1.57 % vs. 99.55±1.22 %). As a result, the simulated online information transfer rate (ITR) with the dynamic stopping method achieved a significant improvement compared to the conventional method (125.30±21.55 bits/min vs. 92.75±23.77 bits/min). These results suggest that the proposed dynamic stopping method is effective for improving the performance of SSVEP-based BCI systems.
authors.forename: Masaki
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Nakanishi
authors.lastname: Yijun Wang
authors.lastname: Yu-Te Wang
authors.lastname: Tzyy-Ping Jung
mesh_terms: D062207:Brain-Computer Interfaces; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual; D005128:Eye Diseases; D006801:Humans; D009460:Neurologic Examination; D010775:Photic Stimulation