Parallel Processing of Massive EEG Data with MapReduce

Analysis of neural signals like electroencephalogram (EEG) is one of the key technologies in detecting and diagnosing various brain disorders. As neural signals are non-stationary and non-linear in nature, it is almost impossible to understand their true physical dynamics until the recent advent of the Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) algorithm. The neural signal processing with EEMD is highly compute-intensive due to the high complexity of the EEMD algorithm. It is also data intensive because 1) EEG signals contain massive data sets 2) EEMD has to introduce a large number of trials in processing to ensure precision. The Map Reduce programming mode is a promising parallel computing paradigm for data intensive computing. To increase the efficiency and performance of the neural signal analysis, this research develops parallel EEMD neural signal processing with Map Reduce. In this paper, we implement the parallel EEMD with Hadoop in a modern cyber infrastructure. Test results and performance evaluation show that parallel EEMD can significantly improve the performance of neural signal processing.