The quantitative application of channel importance in movement intention decoding

• By using random forest algorithm, the channel importance is calculated in frequency domain to quantify the contribution of each electrode. • A channel importance based imaging method, called CIBI, is proposed to generate two main band images for motor imagery (MI) EEG. • A dual branch fusion convolutional neural network is developed to match with the characteristics of two MI images for decoding movement intention. The complex brain network consists of multiple collaborative regions, which can be activated to varying degrees by motor imagery (MI) and the induced electroencephalogram (EEG) recorded by an array of scalp electrodes is usually decoded for driving rehabilitation system. Either all channels or partially selected channels are equally applied to recognize movement intention, which may be incompatible with the individual differences of channels from different locations. In this paper, a channel importance based imaging method is proposed, denoted as CIBI. For each electrode of MI-EEG, the power over 8–30 Hz band is calculated from discrete Fourier spectrum and input to random forest algorithm (RF) to quantify its contribution, namely channel importance (CI); Then, CI is used for weighting the powers of α and β rhythms, which are interpolated to a 32 × 32 grid by using Clough-Tocher method respectively, generating two main band images with time-frequency-space information. In addition, a dual branch fusion convolutional neural network (DBFCNN) is developed to match with the characteristic of two MI images, realizing the extraction, fusion and classification of comprehensive features. Extensive experiments are conducted based on two public datasets with four classes of MI-EEG, the relatively higher average accuracies are obtained, and the improvements achieve 23.95 % and 25.14 % respectively when using channel importance, their statistical analysis are also performed by Kappa value, confusion matrix and receiver operating characteristic. Experiment results show that the personalized channel importance is helpful to enhance inter-class separability as well as the proposed method has the outstanding decoding ability for multiple MI tasks.