Cross-subject Decoding of Eye Movement Goals from Local Field Potentials

Objective. We consider the cross-subject decoding problem from local field potential (LFP) activity, where training data collected from the pre-frontal cortex of a subject (source) is used to decode intended motor actions in another subject (destination). Approach. We propose a novel pre-processing technique, referred to as data centering, which is used to adapt the feature space of the source to the feature space of the destination. The key ingredients of data centering are the transfer functions used to model the deterministic component of the relationship between the source and destination feature spaces. We also develop an efficient data-driven estimation approach for linear transfer functions that uses the first and second order moments of the class-conditional distributions. Main result. We apply our techniques for cross-subject decoding of eye movement directions in an experiment where two macaque monkeys perform memory-guided visual saccades to one of eight target locations. The results show peak cross-subject decoding performance of $80\%$, which marks a substantial improvement over random choice decoder. Significance. The analyses presented herein demonstrate that the data centering is a viable novel technique for reliable cross-subject brain-computer interfacing.