Using oscillatory and aperiodic neural activity features for identifying idle state in SSVEP-based BCIs reduces false triggers

Objective. In existing studies, rhythmic (oscillatory) components were used as main features to identify brain states, such as control and idle states, while non-rhythmic (aperiodic) components were ignored. Recent studies have shown that aperiodic (1/f) activity is functionally related to cognitive processes. It is not clear if aperiodic activity can distinguish brain states in asynchronous brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) to reduce false triggers. In this paper, we propose an asynchronous method based on the fusion of oscillatory and aperiodic features for steady-state visual evoked potential-based BCIs. Approach. The proposed method first evaluates the oscillatory and aperiodic components of control and idle states using irregular-resampling auto-spectral analysis. Oscillatory features are then extracted using the spectral power of fundamental, second-harmonic, and third-harmonic frequencies of the oscillatory component, and aperiodic features are extracted using the slope and intercept of the first-order polynomial of the spectral fit of the aperiodic component under a log-logarithmic axis. The process produces two types of feature pools (oscillatory, aperiodic features). Next, feature selection (dimensionality reduction) is applied to the feature pools by Bonferroni corrected p-values from two-way analysis of variance. Last, these spatial-specific statistically significant features are used as input for classification to identify the idle state. Main results. On a 7-target dataset from 15 subjects, the mix of oscillatory and aperiodic features achieved an average accuracy of 88.39% compared to 83.53% when using oscillatory features alone (4.86% improvement). The results demonstrated that the proposed idle state recognition method achieved enhanced performance by incorporating aperiodic features. Significance. Our results demonstrated that (1) aperiodic features were effective in recognizing idle states and (2) fusing features of oscillatory and aperiodic components enhanced classification performance by 4.86% compared to oscillatory features alone.