Tutorial 12: Artifact detection

Authors: Francois Tadel, Elizabeth Bock, Sylvain Baillet

The previous tutorials illustrated how to remove noise patterns occurring continuously and at specific frequencies. However, most of the events that contaminate the MEG/EEG recordings are not persistant, span over a large frequency range or overlap with the frequencies of the brain signals of interest. Frequency filters are not appropriate to correct for eye movements, breathing movements, heartbeats or other muscle activity.

For getting rid of reproducible artifacts, one popular approach is the Signal-Space Projection (SSP). This method is based on the spatial decomposition of the MEG/EEG recordings for a selection of time samples during which the artifact is present. Therefore we need to identify when each type of artifacts is occurring in the recordings. This tutorial shows how to automatically detect some well defined artifacts: the blinks and the heartbeats.

Observation

Let's start by observing the type of contamination the blinks and heartbeats cause to the MEG recordings.

Detection: Heartbeats

In the Record tab, select the menu: "Artifacts > Detect heartbeats".

Now do the same thing for the blinks: Menu "Artifacts > Detect eye blinks".

Remove simultaneous blinks/heartbeats

We will use these event markers as the input to our SSP cleaning method. This technique works well if each artifact is defined precisely and as independently as possible from the other artifacts. This means that we should try to avoid having two different artifacts marked at the same time.

Because the heart beats every second or so, there is a high chance that when the subject blinks there is a heartbeat not too far away in the recordings. We cannot remove all the blinks that are contaminated with a heartbeat because we would have no data left. But we have a lot of heartbeats, so we can do the contrary: remove the markers "cardiac" that are occurring during a blink.

In the Record tab, select the menu "Artifacts > Remove simultaneous". Set the options:

After executing this process, the number of "cardiac" events goes from 464 to 455. The deleted heartbeats were all less than 250ms away from a blink.

Run #02: Running from a script

Let's perform the same detection operations on Run #02, using this time the Process1 box.

Advanced

Artifacts classification

In cases where the EOG signals are not as clean as in this example, the detection processes may create more than one blink category, for instance: blink, blink2, blink3. This algorithm not only detects specific events in a signal, it also classifies them by shape. For two detected events, the signals around the event marker have to be sufficiently correlated (> 0.8) to be classified in the same category. At the end of the process, all the categories that contain less than 5 events are deleted.

In the good cases, this can provide an automatic classification of different types of for artifacts, for instance: blinks, saccades and other eye movements. The tutorial MEG median nerve (CTF) is a good illustration of this appropriate classification: blink groups the real blinks, and blink2 contains mostly saccades.

In the bad cases, the signal is too noisy and the classfication fails. It leads to either many different categories, or none if all the categories have less than 5 events. If you don't get good results with the process "Detect eye blinks", you can try to run a custom detection with this classification disabled.

At the contrary, if you obtain one category that mixes multiple types of artifacts and would like to separate them in different sub-groups automatically, you can try to execute the process
"Events > Classify by shape". It is more powerful than the automatic classification from the event detection, because it can run on multiple signals at the same type: first it reduces the number of dimensions with a PCA decomposition, then runs a similar classification procedure.

Advanced

Custom detection

These two processes "Detect heartbeats" and "Detect eye blinks" are in reality shortcuts for a generic process "Detect custom events". This process can be used for detecting any kind of event based on the signal power in a specific frequency band. We are not going to use it here, but you may have to use it if the standard parameters do not work well, or for detecting other types of events.

Advanced

In case of failure

If the signals are not as clean as in this sample dataset, the automatic detection of the heartbeats and blinks may fail with the standard parameters. You may have to use the process "Detect custom events" and adjust some parameters. For instance:

If you cannot get your artifacts to be detected automatically, you can browse through the recordings and mark all the artifacts manually, as explained in the tutorial Event markers.

Additional documentation








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Tutorials/ArtifactsDetect (last edited 2016-03-17 18:37:15 by FrancoisTadel)