Dottorato in TECNOLOGIE DELL'INFORMAZIONE E DELLE COMUNICAZIONI (ICT)

Titolo della tesi: Leveraging brain connectivity networks to detect mental states during motor imagery

The brain is a complex network and we know that inter-areal synchronization and de-synchronization mechanisms are crucial to perform motor and cognitive tasks. Nowadays, brain functional interactions are studied in brain-computer interface (BCI) applications with more and more interest. This might have strong impact on BCI systems, typically based on univariate features which separately characterize brain regional activities. Indeed, brain connectivity features can be used to develop alternative BCIs in an effort to improve performance and to extend their real-life applicability. The ambition of this thesis is the investigation of brain functional connectivity networks during motor imagery (MI)-based BCI tasks. It aims to identify complex brain functioning, re-organization processes and timevarying dynamics, at both group and individual level. This thesis presents different developments that sequentially enrich an initially simple model in order to obtain a robust method for the study of functional connectivity networks. Experimental results on simulated and real EEG data recorded during BCI tasks prove that our proposed method well explains the variegate behaviour of brain EEG data. Specifically, it provides a characterization of brain functional mechanisms at group level, together with a measure of the separability of mental conditions at individual level. We also present a graph denoising procedure to filter data which simultaneously preserve the graph connectivity structure and enhance the signal-to-noise ratio. Since the use of a BCI system requires a dynamic interaction between user and machine, we finally propose a method to capture the evolution of time-varying data. In essence, this thesis presents a novel framework to grasp the complexity of graph functional connectivity during cognitive tasks.