Across-subject offline decoding of motor imagery from MEG and EEG

Long calibration time hinders the feasibility of brain-computer interfaces (BCI). If other subjects’ data were used for training the classifier, BCI-based neurofeedback practice could start without the initial calibration. Here, we compare methods for inter-subject decoding of left- vs. right-hand motor imagery (MI) from MEG and EEG.Six methods were tested on data involving MEG and EEG measurements of healthy participants. Only subjects with good within-subject accuracies were selected for inter-subject decoding. Three methods were based on the Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) algorithm, and three others on logistic regression with l1 - or l2,1 -norm regularization. The decoding accuracy was evaluated using 1) MI and 2) passive movements (PM) for training, separately for MEG and EEG.When the classifier was trained by MI, the best accuracies across subjects (mean 70.6% for MEG, 67.7% for EEG) were obtained using multi-task learning (MTL) with logistic regression and l2,1-norm regularization. MEG yielded slightly better average accuracies than EEG. When PM were used for training, none of the inter-subject methods yielded above chance level (58.7%) accuracy.In conclusion, MTL and training with other subject’s MI is efficient for inter-subject decoding of MI. Passive movements of other subjects are likely suboptimal for training the MI classifiers.