Inter-individual single-trial classification of MEG data using M-CCA

Neuroscientific studies often involve some form of group analysis over multiple participants. This requires alignment of recordings across participants. A naive solution is to assume that participants’ recordings can be aligned anatomically in sensor space. However, this assumption is likely violated due to anatomical and functional differences between individual brains. In magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings the problem of inter-subject alignment is exacerbated by the susceptibility of MEG to individual cortical folding patterns as well as the inter-subject variability of sensor locations over the brain due to the use of a fixed helmet. Hence, an approach to combine MEG data over individual brains should relax the assumptions that a) brain anatomy and function are tightly linked and b) that the same sensors capture functionally comparable brain activation across individuals. Here we use multiset canonical correlation analysis (M-CCA) to find a common representation of MEG activations recorded from 15 participants performing a grasping task. The M-CCA algorithm was applied to transform the data of a set of multiple participants into a common space with maximum correlation between participants. Importantly, we derive a method to transform data from a new, previously unseen participant into this common representation. This makes it useful for applications that require transfer of models derived from a group of individuals to new individuals. We demonstrate the usefulness and superiority of the approach with respect to previously used approaches. Finally, we show that our approach requires only a small number of labeled data from the new participant. The proposed method demonstrates that functionally motivated common spaces have potential applications in reducing training time of online brain-computer interfaces, where models can be pre-trained on previous participants/sessions. Moreover, inter-subject alignment via M-CCA has the potential for combining data of different participants and could become helpful in future endeavors on large open datasets.