Intelligent fuzzy system for automatic artifact detection and removal from EEG signals

Abstract

The EEG signals were used in many medical and technological applications such as diagnosis of diseases, rehabilitation of disabled peoples, preventive healthcare, BCI (brain computer interface) systems. EEG signal is prone to the physiological and non-physiological artifacts which severely affect them and lead to its misinterpretation. An automatic method and/or algorithm; for handling EEG artifacts; is proposed. The proposed method is based on three statistical parameters (entropy, kurtosis and skewness), fuzzy inference system (FIS) and stationary wavelet transform (SWT). Each incoming EEG epoch is described using these three statistical parameters. Based on the extracted statistical parameters, the designed FIS decides if an epoch is artifactual or not. Then SWT is used to decompose the EEG epoch into detail and approximation coefficients. To reduce the effect of artifact removal, we propose to use other fuzzy inference systems, which allow to select the contaminated wavelet coefficients. The universal thresholding method is then applied to the corrupted coefficients. Finally, the inverse SWT applies to the thresholded and non-corrupted coefficients to restore the cleaned EEG signal. The performance of the proposed method in terms of amount of artifact removal and signal distortion is evaluated in three scenarios: fully simulated, semi-simulated, and real artifactual EEG data. The comparison of our method with some existing state-of-the-art methods shows the superiority of our method over others in terms of performance and computational time.