Fabio Babiloni, Ph.D.
Non Invasive EEG-Based Brain Computer Interface for Communication and Control
Luncheon Presentation, Thursday, 7 February 2008, Conrad Hilton Ballroom
The aim of this talk is to analyze whether the use of the cortical activity estimated from non-invasive EEG recordings could be useful to detect mental states related to the imagination of limb movements. Estimation of cortical activity was performed on high resolution EEG data related to the imagination of limb movements gathered in five normal healthy subjects by using realistic head models. Cortical activity was estimated in Region of Interest associated with the subject’s Brodmann areas by using depth-weighted minimum norm solutions. Comparisons between surface recorded EEG and the estimated cortical activity were performed. The estimated cortical activity related to the mental imagery of limbs in the five subjects is located mainly over the contralateral primary motor area. The imbalance between brain activity estimated in contralateral and ipsilateral motor cortical areas relative to the finger movement imagination is greater than those obtained in the scalp EEG recordings. Results suggest that the use of the estimated cortical activity for the motor imagery of upper limbs could be potentially superior with respect to the use of surface EEG recordings.
Fabio Babiloni was born in Rome in 1961. He earned the master degree in Electronic Engineering at the University of Rome “La Sapienza“ summa cum laude in 1986, and the PhD in Computational Engineering at the Helsinki University of Technology, Helsinki in the year 2000 with a dissertation on the multimodal integration of EEG and fMRI.
He is currently Associate Professor of Human Physiology at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” Rome, Italy. He is an author of more that 85 papers on bioengineering and neurophysiological topics in international peer-reviewed scientific journals, and more than 200 contributions to conferences and books chapter. His current interests are in the field of multimodal integration of EEG, MEG and fMRI data, cortical connectivity estimation and Brain Computer Interface. Prof. Babiloni is currently a grant reviewer for the National Science Foundation (NSF) USA, the Academy of Finland, Finland, the Austrian Fund of Research, Austria and the European Union through the FP6 and FP7 research programs. Prof. Babiloni is president of the International Society of Bioelectromagnetism, member of the Italian Society of Physiology and the Italian Society of Clinical Neurophysiology. He is an Associate Editor of four scientific journals: “Clinical Neurophysiology,” “International Journal of Bioelectromagnetism,” “IEEE Trans. On Neural System and Rehabilitation Engineering,” and “Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience.”
