Patient Plays a Musical Instrument While Brain Tumour Removed

A team of neurosurgeons at a Spain hospital successfully removed a brain tumour while the patient was conscious and playing saxophone. With this approach it was possible to operate without damaging the part of the brain involved in musical language.

Aguilera, who was told he had a brain tumour after suffering dizzy spells, said: “Music is what has accompanied me half a lifetime, so when the doctors told me I could do that, I did not think twice.”

This is clearly one of the many advances in medicine and neuroscience. More information here.

Silent Speech EEG Classification

Silent Speech Classification is a very interesting BCI research using a large number of electrodes where several methods are applied as Adaptive Collection, Common Spatial Patterns (CSP), Support Vector Machine with Gaussian kernel (SVM-G) and Relevance Vector Machine with Gaussian kernel (RVM). 

Mariko Matsumoto is one of the researches dedicated to this area published last year two papers: “Silent speech decoder using adaptive collection,” “Verification of Adaptive Collection for BCI” and "BCI using Silent Speech for Speech Assistive Device".

For more information about BCI/EEG press here.

Brain Computer Interfaces: Fundamentals and Methods

A new BCI book created by Laurent Bougrain, Maureen Clerc and Fabien Lotte will be released soon.

With a price of $140 pre-orders are available here.

OpenVibe 1.1.0 - new version

BCI OpenVibe application has since October a new version available for download. This toolbox allows the creation of BCI circuits using predefined modules or created according to our needs. It was mencioned before in this blog with the posts: OpenVibe 3D Voxel and Topographic Map, Open Source Software For EEG and EEG Animation Using Interactive Matlab Toolbox. 

Following are some of the new features implemented:

• Plugins: Implemented MLP classification algorithm; Added a Regularized version of the CSP filter trainer; Added a new plugin category for evaluation; Added 3 new boxes to evaluation: kappa coefficient, ROCCurve, General Statistics Generator.
• New open source drivers: eemagine EEGO.
• New binary drivers: Brain Rhythm 8, Simulator, SmartBCI and Wearable Sensing Dry Sensor Interface.
• More Plugins: The LDA now has a native multiclass mode; The Spatial Filter box now accepts a configuration file which contains a matrix (refer to the doc for the format specification); The xDawn and the CSP trainer can generate matrix file for the spatial filter; Various optimizations of the Spatial Filter; Changed Signal Display refresh paradigm to make it handle bigger datasets; TCP writer box sends Streamed Matrix and Signal in row-major order.
• Misc: Added ASCII import and export functions for IMatrix matrices
• Drivers: Extended Emotiv EPOC support to gnu/linux; Added Software tagging to the universal TMSI driver; Moved the check impedance option to be part of driver preferences; Various updates to BrainProducts VAmp, BrainProducts Brainamp.
• Tutorials: Added an example of stimulation passing to Python.

It is also supported now by more than 20 acquisition devices:

ANT, ANT/EEmagine, Biosemi, BrainMaster, Brain Products, Cognionics, CTF/VSM, EGI, Emotiv, gTec, LabStreamingLayer, mBrainTrain, MCS/MKS, Micromed, MindMedia, Mitsar, Neuroelectrics, Neurosky, OpenBCI, OpenEEG, TMSi.

For more information press here.