A Monte Carlo Sequential Estimation of Point Process Optimum Filtering for Brain Machine Interfaces

The previous decoding algorithms for brain machine interfaces are normally utilized to estimate animal´s movement from binned spike rates, which loses spike timing resolution and may exclude rich neural dynamics due to single spikes. Based on recently proposed Monte Carlo sequential estimation algorithm on point process, we present a decoding framework to reconstruct the kinematic states directly from the multi-channel spike trains. Starting with analysis on the differences between the simulation and real BMI data, neural tuning properties are modeled to encode the movement information of the experimental primate as the pre-knowledge for Monte-Carlo sequential estimation for BMI. The preliminary kinematics reconstruction shows better results when compared with Kalman filter.