Technology and signal processing for brain-machine interfaces (paper) Jie Fu https://sites.google.

com/site/bigaidream/ 3/7/2013 8:16 PM KEY: signal processing for neural signal Neurotechnology is the enabling mechanism through which function of the nervous system can be restored or enhanced using bioengineering principles.

It is believed that the neocortex is a scale-free system, with highly unstable transient dynamics and order parameters that bring the system back to lower energy states. How a neuron contributes to macroscopic cognitive events in space-time that produce behavior is still today largely unknown.

Grand challenges of BMIs

Multiscale signal processing and modeling
[KEY] The challenge in the development of new signal processing approaches for BMI data analysis is learning how to handle large multi-input multi-output systems with signal representations that span continuous and discrete time. The best performing BMIs require in

principle sufficient knowledge of the spatio-temporal representation created by assemblies of neurons. Therefore, a critical path for advancement involves the integration of improved signal processing methods that capture global computation on multiple spatial and temporal scales. {deep architecture would be a good choice}

Control feature extraction in model-based BMIs

[KEY] The success of BMIs relies heavily upon the ability to first extract control features from neural activity related to goal-directed behavior. The neural representation of control commands has been analyzed from three perspectives: spectral analysis (continuous brain oscillations), firing rate coding (semi-continuous neuromodulation), and spike timing (point process spike events), as shown in Figure 1. [KEY] The rate coding BMI experimental paradigm lends itself very nicely to statistical signal processing methodologies used to derive optimal models from data. It is possible to translate the decoding problem into a system identification framework, where a parametric linear or nonlinear system can be trained directly from the data to achieve outputs with small error compared to the true hand positions.

Spike timing in neural decoding

Quantification of temporal structure of spike trains for BMIs is an important operation in the processing and analysis of any point process and, in particular, of neural spike trains [Multiple neural spike train data analysis: State-of-the-art and future challenges]. In contrast to the rate-coding hypothesis, is there any advantage in decoding accuracy when using spike timing-based representations? [KEY] The fundamental problem in BMI signal processing is how to find more effective ways to work directly with spikes for modeling. A new statistical framework to directly quantify the time structure of multichannel spike trains to quantify entropy over a time segment using the concepts recently introduced in information theoretic learning (ITL). These approaches can define a continuous time stochastic function to quantify the similarity between spike trains, which is called the instantaneous cross information potential (ICIP). [LIMITATIONs] Despite these advances, all the probabilistic approaches require preknowledge of the neuron receptive properties. Moreover, there is potential advantage in terms of accuracy but the algorithms become much more computationally complex because they must be updated on the time scale of the spike times (1 ms or less).

Summary
It is clear that the next generation of BMI technologies cannot be built solely from existing

engineering principles. Neural engineering approaches can benefit from the intersection of top-down signal processing techniques with bottom-up theories of neurophysiology. By reverse engineering the neural interface problem using modified versions of standard signal processing techniques, one can overcome the bottlenecks.