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The prospect of electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) in the presence of topological information of participants is often left unexplored in most of the brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. Additionally, the usage of these modalities together in the field of multimodality analysis to support multiple brain signals toward improving BCI performance is not fully examined. This study first presents a multimodal data fusion framework to exploit and decode the complementary synergistic properties in multimodal neural signals. Moreover, the relations among different subjects and their observations also play critical roles in classifying unknown subjects. We developed a context-aware graph neural network (GNN) model utilizing the pairwise relationship among participants to investigate the performance on an auditory task classification. We explored standard and deviant auditory EEG and fNIRS data where each subject was asked to perform an auditory oddball task and has multiple trials regarded as context-aware nodes in our graph construction. In experiments, our multimodal data fusion strategy showed an improvement up to 8.40% via SVM and 2.02% via GNN, compared to the single-modal EEG or fNIRS. In addition, our context-aware GNN achieved 5.3%, 4.07% and 4.53% higher accuracy for EEG, fNIRS and multimodal data based experiments, compared to the baseline models.
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This content will become publicly available on November 1, 2025
fNIRSNET: A multi-view spatio-temporal convolutional neural network fusion for functional near-infrared spectroscopy-based auditory event classification
Multi-view learning is a rapidly evolving research area focused on developing diverse learning representations. In neural data analysis, this approach holds immense potential by capturing spatial, temporal, and frequency features. Despite its promise, multi-view application to functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has remained largely unexplored. This study addresses this gap by introducing fNIRSNET, a novel framework that generates and fuses multi-view spatio-temporal representations using convolutional neural networks. It investigates the combined informational strength of oxygenated (HbO2) and deoxygenated (HbR) hemoglobin signals, further extending these capabilities by integrating with electroencephalography (EEG) networks to achieve robust multimodal classification. Experiments involved classifying neural responses to auditory stimuli with nine healthy participants. fNIRS signals were decomposed into HbO2/HbR concentration changes, resulting in Parallel and Merged input types. We evaluated four input types across three data compositions: balanced, subject, and complete datasets. Our fNIRSNET's performance was compared with eight baseline classification models and merged it with four common EEG networks to assess the efficacy of combined features for multimodal classification. Compared to baselines, fNIRSNET using the Merged input type achieved the highest accuracy of 83.22%, 81.18%, and 91.58% for balanced, subject, and complete datasets, respectively. In the complete set, the approach effectively mitigated class imbalance issues, achieving sensitivity of 83.58% and specificity of 95.42%. Multimodal fusion of EEG networks and fNIRSNET outperformed single-modality performance with the highest accuracy of 87.15% on balanced data. Overall, this study introduces an innovative fusion approach for decoding fNIRS data and illustrates its integration with established EEG networks to enhance performance.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2024418
- PAR ID:
- 10544929
- Publisher / Repository:
- Elsevier
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence
- Volume:
- 137
- Issue:
- PB
- ISSN:
- 0952-1976
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 109256
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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