Si Xiaopeng, Han Yumeng, Li Sicheng, Zhang Shuai, Ming Dong
IEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng. 2025;33:2577-2586. doi: 10.1109/TNSRE.2025.3584765.
Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), with its non-invasive and high spatial resolution, holds promise in developing novel affective brain-computer interface (BCI). Similar to motor imagery BCI, emotion imagery BCI could recognize internal emotions and convey them to the external world. This holds clinical value for expressing emotions in patients with neurological impairments and serves as a proactive emotion regulation method. However, the fNIRS features of emotion imagery for affective BCI and the discriminability of different emotion categories remain unclear. Here, this study designed a novel emotion verbal imagery paradigm (imagining descriptions of happy or sad scenes). First, task-related hemodynamic responses were analyzed from 17 subjects. Then, statistical analyses were then conducted to reveal the significant cortical spatial response patterns. Additionally, decoding experiments and model interpretability are employed to assist in validating the feasibility of the emotion imagery BCI. Results showed: 1) Happy imagery recruited frontoparietal regions, such as the left dorsal secondary motor cortex, ventral secondary motor cortex, and inferior parietal lobe. 2) Sad imagery mainly recruited the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. 3) The left dorsal sensorimotor cortex exhibited selective responsiveness to happy imagery and sad imagery. 4) The classification results of the emotion imagery task exceeded the random level. 5) Emotional categories activation responses showed significant similarity with the hemodynamic responses of the imagination tasks. Taken together, by proposing the emotion imagery fNIRS paradigm, this work could shed light on the development of feature non-invasive BCI.
功能近红外光谱技术（fNIRS）具有非侵入性和高空间分辨率的特点，在开发新型情感脑机接口（BCI）方面具有广阔前景。与运动想象脑机接口类似，情感想象脑机接口能够识别内在情绪并将其传达给外部世界。这对于神经功能受损患者表达情绪具有临床价值，并且可作为一种主动的情绪调节方法。然而，情感脑机接口中情感想象的fNIRS特征以及不同情感类别的可辨别性仍不明确。在此，本研究设计了一种新型的情感言语想象范式（想象快乐或悲伤场景的描述）。首先，分析了17名受试者与任务相关的血流动力学反应。然后，进行统计分析以揭示显著的皮质空间反应模式。此外，采用解码实验和模型可解释性来辅助验证情感想象脑机接口的可行性。结果表明：1）快乐想象激活了额顶叶区域，如左侧背侧二级运动皮层、腹侧二级运动皮层和下顶叶。2）悲伤想象主要激活了右侧背外侧前额叶皮层。3）左侧背侧感觉运动皮层对快乐想象和悲伤想象表现出选择性反应。4）情感想象任务的分类结果超过了随机水平。5）情感类别激活反应与想象任务的血流动力学反应表现出显著相似性。综上所述，通过提出情感想象fNIRS范式，本研究可为无创脑机接口特征的发展提供启示。
