Pre-whitening and Null Projection as an Artifact Suppression Method for Electrocorticography Stimulation in Bi-Directional Brain Computer Interfaces.

Electrocorticography (ECoG)-based bi-directional (BD) brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are a forthcoming technology promising to help restore function to those with motor and sensory deficits. A major problem with this paradigm is that the cortical stimulation necessary to elicit artificial sensation creates strong electrical artifacts that can disrupt BCI operation by saturating recording amplifiers or obscuring useful neural signal. Even with state-of-the-art hardware artifact suppression methods, robust signal processing techniques are still required to suppress residual artifacts that are present at the digital back-end. Herein we demonstrate the effectiveness of a pre-whitening and null projection artifact suppression method using ECoG data recorded during a clinical neurostimulation procedure. Our method achieved a maximum artifact suppression of 21.49 dB and significantly increased the number of artifact-free frequencies in the frequency domain. This performance surpasses that of a more traditional independent component analysis methodology, while retaining a reduced complexity and increased computational efficiency.