%0 Journal Article
%T A learnable EEG channel selection method for MI-BCI using efficient channel attention.
%A Tong L
%A Qian Y
%A Peng L
%A Wang C
%A Hou ZG
%J Front Neurosci
%V 17
%N 0
%D 2023
%M 37928726
%F 5.152
%R 10.3389/fnins.2023.1276067
%X <B>UNASSIGNED: </B>During electroencephalography (EEG)-based motor imagery-brain-computer interfaces (MI-BCIs) task, a large number of electrodes are commonly used, and consume much computational resources. Therefore, channel selection is crucial while ensuring classification accuracy.<BR><B>UNASSIGNED: </B>This paper proposes a channel selection method by integrating the efficient channel attention (ECA) module with a convolutional neural network (CNN). During model training process, the ECA module automatically assigns the channel weights by evaluating the relative importance for BCI classification accuracy of every channel. Then a ranking of EEG channel importance can be established so as to select an appropriate number of channels to form a channel subset from the ranking. In this paper, the ECA module is embedded into a commonly used network for MI, and comparative experiments are conducted on the BCI Competition IV dataset 2a.<BR><B>UNASSIGNED: </B>The proposed method achieved an average accuracy of 75.76% with all 22 channels and 69.52% with eight channels in a four-class classification task, outperforming other state-of-the-art EEG channel selection methods. The result demonstrates that the proposed method provides an effective channel selection approach for EEG-based MI-BCI.