Tutorial 13: Artifact cleaning with SSP

Authors: Francois Tadel, Elizabeth Bock, John C Mosher, Sylvain Baillet

As previously said, the frequency filters are not adapted to remove artifacts that are transient or overlapping in frequency domain with the brain signals of interest. Other approaches exist to correct for these artifacts, based on the spatial signature of the artifacts.

If an event is very reproducible and occurs always at the same location (eg. eye blinks and heartbeats), the sensors will always record the same values when it occurs. We can identify the topographies corresponding to this artifact (ie. the spatial distributions of values at one time point) and remove them from the recordings. This spatial decomposition is the basic idea behind two widely used approaches: the SSP (Signal-Space Projection) and ICA (Independent Component Analysis) methods.

This introduction tutorial will focus on the SSP approach, as it is a lot simpler and faster but still very efficient for removing blinks and heartbeats from MEG recordings. The interface for running ICA decompositions is very similar and will be described in an advanced tutorial.

Overview

The general SSP objective is to identify the sensor topographies that are typical of a specific artifact, then to create spatial projectors to remove the contributions of these topographies from the recordings.

  1. We start by identifying many examples of the artifact we are trying to remove. This is what we've been doing in the previous tutorial with the creation of the "cardiac" and "blink" events.
  2. We extract a short time window around each of these event markers and concatenate in time all the small blocks of recordings.
  3. We run a principle components analysis (PCA) on the concatenated artifacts in order to get a decomposition in various spatial components (number of components = number of sensors).
  4. If it works well, we can find in the first few principal components some topographies that are very specific of the type of artifact we are targeting. We select these components to remove.
  5. We compute a linear projector for each spatial component to remove and save them in the database (in the "Link to raw file"). They are not immediately applied to the recordings.
  6. Whenever some recordings are read from this file, the SSP projectors are applied on the fly to remove the artifact contributions. This approach is fast and memory efficient.
  7. Note that these tools are available on continuous files only ("Link to raw file") and cannot be applied to recordings that have already been imported in the database.

    ssp_intro.gif

The order matters

This procedure has to be repeated separately for each artifact type. The order in which you process the artifacts matters, because for removing the second artifact we typically use the recordings cleaned with the first set of SSP projectors. We have to decide which one to process first.

It works best if each artifact is defined precisely and as independently as possible from the other artifacts. If the two artifacts happen simultaneously, the SSP projectors calculated for the blink may contain some of the heartbeat topography and vice versa. When trying to remove the second artifact, we might not be able to clearly isolate it anymore.

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. Therefore a significant number of the blinks will be contaminated with heartbeats. But we have usually a lot of "clean" heartbeats, we can start by removing these ones. To correctly isolate these two common artifacts, we recommend the following procedure:

If you have multiple modalities recorded simultaneously, for example MEG and EEG, you should run this entire procedure twice, once for the EEG only and once for the MEG only. You will always get better results if you process the different types of sensors separately. Same thing when processing Elekta-Neuromag recordings: separately process the magnetometers (MEG MAG) and the gradiometers (MEG GRAD).

SSP: Heartbeats

Double-click on the link to show the MEG sensors for Run #01.
In the Record tab, select the menu: "Artifacts > SSP: Heartbeats".

After the computation is done, a new figure is displayed, that lets you select the active projectors.

Evaluate the components

The percentage indicated for the first value (9%) is much higher than the following ones (5%, 5%, 4%, 3%...), this could indicate that it targets relatively well the cardiac artifact. Let's investigate this.



Evaluate the correction

The topography of the component #1 looks like it represents the heart activity and its temporal evolution shows peaks where we identified heartbeats. It is therefore a good candidate for removal, we just need to make sure the signals look good after the correction before validating this choice.

Let's try the same thing with the eye blinks.

Run #02

Reproduce the same operations on Run #02:

Note for beginners

Everything below is advanced documentation, you can skip it for now.




Advanced

SSP: Generic

The calculation of the SSP for the heartbeats and the eye blinks are shortcuts to a more generic process "Artifacts > SSP: Generic". You may need this process if the standard parameters do not work of if you want to use this technique to remove other types of artifacts.

Advanced

Averaged artifact

One efficient way of representing the impact of this artifact correction is to epoch the recordings around the artifacts before and after the correction and compute the average of these epochs.

Advanced

Troubleshooting

You have calculated your SSP projectors as indicated here but you don't get any good results. No matter what you do, the topographies don't look like the targeted artifact. You can try the following:

Always look at what this procedure gives you in output. Most of the time, the artifact cleaning will be an iterative process where you will need several experiments to adjust the options and the order of the different steps in order to get optimal results.

Advanced

SSP Theory

The Signal-Space Projection (SSP) is one approach to rejection of external disturbances. Here is a short description of the method by Matti Hämäläinen, from the MNE 2.7 reference manual, section 4.16.

Unlike many other noise-cancellation approaches, SSP does not require additional reference sensors to record the disturbance fields. Instead, SSP relies on the fact that the magnetic field distributions generated by the sources in the brain have spatial distributions sufficiently different from these generated by external noise sources. Furthermore, it is implicitly assumed that the linear space spanned by the significant external noise patterns has a low dimension.

Without loss of generality we can always decompose any n-channel measurement b(t) into its signal and noise components as:

Further, if we know that bn(t) is well characterized by a few field patterns b1...bm, we can express the disturbance as

where the columns of U constitute an orthonormal basis for b1...bm, cn(t) is an m-component column vector, and the error term e(t) is small and does not exhibit any consistent spatial distributions over time, i.e., Ce = E{eeT} = I. Subsequently, we will call the column space of U the noise subspace. The basic idea of SSP is that we can actually find a small basis set b1...bm such that the conditions described above are satisfied. We can now construct the orthogonal complement operator

and apply it to b(t) yielding

since Pbn(t) = PUcn(t) ≈ 0. The projection operator P is called the signal-space projection operator and generally provides considerable rejection of noise, suppressing external disturbances by a factor of 10 or more. The effectiveness of SSP depends on two factors:

  1. The basis set b1...bm should be able to characterize the disturbance field patterns completely and

  2. The angles between the noise subspace space spanned by b1...bm and the signal vectors bs(t) should be as close to π/2 as possible.

If the first requirement is not satisfied, some noise will leak through because Pbn(t) ≠ 0. If the any of the brain signal vectors bs(t) is close to the noise subspace not only the noise but also the signal will be attenuated by the application of P and, consequently, there might by little gain in signal-to-noise ratio.

Since the signal-space projection modifies the signal vectors originating in the brain, it is necessary to apply the projection to the forward solution in the course of inverse computations.

Advanced

SSP Algorithm

The logic of the SSP computation is the following:

  1. Take a small time window around each marker to capture the full effect of the artifact, plus some clean brain signals before and after. The default time window is [-200,+200]ms for eye blinks, and [-40,+40]ms for the heartbeats.
  2. Filter the signals in a frequency band of interest, in which the artifact is the most visible (in practice, we extract a segment long enough so that it can be filtered properly, and cut it after filtering).
  3. Concatenate all these time blocks into a big matrix A = [b1, ..., bm]

  4. Compute the singular value decomposition of this matrix A: [U,S,V] = svd(A, 'econ')

  5. The singular vectors Ui with the highest singular values Si are an orthonormal basis of the artifact subspace that we want to subtract from the recordings. The software selects by default the vector with the highest eigenvalue. Then it is possible to redefine interactively the selected components.

  6. Calculate the projection operator: P⊥i = I - UiUiT

  7. Apply this projection on the MEG or EEG recordings F: F = P⊥iF

  8. The process has to be repeated separately several times for each sensor type and each artifact.

Steps #1 to #5 are done by the processes "Artifact > SSP" in the Record tab: the results, the vectors Ui, are saved in the channel file (field ChannelMat.Projector(i).Components).

Steps #6 and #7 are calculated on the fly when reading a block of recordings from the continuous file: when using the raw viewer, running a process a process on the continuous file, or importing epochs in the database.

Step #8 is the manual control of the process. Take some time to understand what you are trying to remove and how to do it. Never trust blindly any fully automated artifact cleaning algorithm, always check manually what is removed from the recordings, and do not give up if the first results are not satisfying.

Advanced

On the hard drive

The projectors are saved in the channel file associated with the recordings. This means that they will be shared by all the files that share the same channel file. As a consequence, you cannot share the channel files between acquisition runs if you are planning to use different SSP projectors for different runs.

You can find them in the field ChannelMat.Projector (array of structures):

ssp_storage.gif

Advanced

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Tutorials/ArtifactsSsp (last edited 2019-07-03 17:21:19 by TakfarinasMedani)