No Arabic abstract
In this work, we present a neuromorphic system that combines for the first time a neural recording headstage with a signal-to-spike conversion circuit and a multi-core spiking neural network (SNN) architecture on the same die for recording, processing, and detecting High Frequency Oscillations (HFO), which are biomarkers for the epileptogenic zone. The device was fabricated using a standard 0.18$mu$m CMOS technology node and has a total area of 99mm$^{2}$. We demonstrate its application to HFO detection in the iEEG recorded from 9 patients with temporal lobe epilepsy who subsequently underwent epilepsy surgery. The total average power consumption of the chip during the detection task was 614.3$mu$W. We show how the neuromorphic system can reliably detect HFOs: the system predicts postsurgical seizure outcome with state-of-the-art accuracy, specificity and sensitivity (78%, 100%, and 33% respectively). This is the first feasibility study towards identifying relevant features in intracranial human data in real-time, on-chip, using event-based processors and spiking neural networks. By providing neuromorphic intelligence to neural recording circuits the approach proposed will pave the way for the development of systems that can detect HFO areas directly in the operation room and improve the seizure outcome of epilepsy surgery.
Predicting post-operative seizure freedom using functional correlation networks derived from interictal intracranial EEG has shown some success. However, there are important challenges to consider. 1: electrodes physically closer to each other naturally tend to be more correlated causing a spatial bias. 2: implantation location and number of electrodes differ between patients, making cross-subject comparisons difficult. 3: functional correlation networks can vary over time but are currently assumed as static. In this study we address these three substantial challenges using intracranial EEG data from 55 patients with intractable focal epilepsy. Patients additionally underwent preoperative MR imaging, intra-operative CT, and post-operative MRI allowing accurate localisation of electrodes and delineation of removed tissue. We show that normalising for spatial proximity between nearby electrodes improves prediction of post-surgery seizure outcomes. Moreover, patients with more extensive electrode coverage were more likely to have their outcome predicted correctly (ROC-AUC >0.9, p<<0.05), but not necessarily more likely to have a better outcome. Finally, our predictions are robust regardless of the time segment. Future studies should account for the spatial proximity of electrodes in functional network construction to improve prediction of post-surgical seizure outcomes. Greater coverage of both removed and spared tissue allows for predictions with higher accuracy.
Mind-wandering (MW), which usually defined as a lapse of attention, occurs between 20%-40% of the time, has negative effects on our daily life. Therefore, detecting when MW occurs can prevent us from those negative outcomes resulting from MW, such as failing to keep track of course during learning. In this work, we first collect a multi-modal Sustained Attention to Response Task (MM-SART) database for detecting MW. Eighty-two participants data are collected in our experiments. For each participant, we collect measures of 32-channels electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, photoplethysmography (PPG) signals, galvanic skin response (GSR) signals, eye tracker signals, and several questionnaires for detailed analyses. Then, we propose an effective MW detection system based on the collected EEG signals. To explore the non-linear characteristics of EEG signals, we utilize the entropy-based features in time, frequency, and wavelet domains. The experimental results show that we can reach 0.712 AUC score by using the random forest (RF) classifier with the leave-one-subject-out cross-validation. Moreover, to lower the overall computational complexity of the MW detection system, we apply techniques of channel selection and feature selection. By using the only two most significant EEG channels, we can reduce the training time of the classifier by 44.16%. By performing correlation importance feature elimination (CIFE) on the feature set, we can further improve the AUC score to 0.725 but with only 14.6% of the selection time compared with the recursive feature elimination (RFE) method. By proposing the MW detection engine, current work can be applied to educational scenarios, especially in the era of remote learning nowadays.
Neuromorphic systems typically employ current-mode circuits that model neural dynamics and produce output currents that range from few pico-Amperes to hundreds of micro-Amperes. On-line real-time monitoring of the signals produced by these circuits is crucial, for prototyping and debugging purposes, as well as for analyzing and understanding the network dynamics and computational properties. To this end, we propose a compact on-chip auto-scaling Current to Frequency Converter (CFC) for real-time monitoring of analog currents in mixed-signal/analog neuromorphic electronic systems. The proposed CFC is a self-timed asynchronous circuit that has a wide dynamic input range of up to 6 decades, ranging from pico-Amps to micro-Amps, with high current measurement sensitivity. To produce a linear output frequency response, while properly covering the wide dynamic input range, the circuit automatically detects the scale of the input current and adjusts the scale of its output firing rate accordingly. Here we describe the proposed circuit and present experimental results measured from multiple instances of the circuit, implemented using a standard 180 nm CMOS process, and interfaced to silicon neuron and synapse circuits for real-time current monitoring. We demonstrate how the circuit is suitable for measuring neural dynamics by showing the converted response properties of the chip silicon neurons and synapses as they are stimulated by input spikes.
In this paper, a real-time signal processing frame-work based on a 60 GHz frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar system to recognize gestures is proposed. In order to improve the robustness of the radar-based gesture recognition system, the proposed framework extracts a comprehensive hand profile, including range, Doppler, azimuth and elevation, over multiple measurement-cycles and encodes them into a feature cube. Rather than feeding the range-Doppler spectrum sequence into a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) connected with recurrent neural networks, the proposed framework takes the aforementioned feature cube as input of a shallow CNN for gesture recognition to reduce the computational complexity. In addition, we develop a hand activity detection (HAD) algorithm to automatize the detection of gestures in real-time case. The proposed HAD can capture the time-stamp at which a gesture finishes and feeds the hand profile of all the relevant measurement-cycles before this time-stamp into the CNN with low latency. Since the proposed framework is able to detect and classify gestures at limited computational cost, it could be deployed in an edge-computing platform for real-time applications, whose performance is notedly inferior to a state-of-the-art personal computer. The experimental results show that the proposed framework has the capability of classifying 12 gestures in real-time with a high F1-score.
The design of high-resolution and cross-term (CT) free time-frequency distributions (TFDs) has been an open problem. Classical kernel based methods are limited by the trade-off between TFD resolution and CT suppression, even under optimally derived parameters. To break the current limitation, we propose a data-driven kernel learning model directly based on Wigner-Ville distribution (WVD). The proposed kernel learning based TFD (KL-TFD) model includes several stacked multi-channel learning convolutional kernels. Specifically, a skipping operator is utilized to maintain correct information transmission, and a weighted block is employed to exploit spatial and channel dependencies. These two designs simultaneously achieve high TFD resolution and CT elimination. Numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-world data confirm the superiority of the proposed KL-TFD over traditional kernel function methods.