Gi-Hwan Shin

Young-Seok Kweon, Gi-Hwan Shin, Heon-Gyu Kwak et al.

Polysomnography (PSG) is an indispensable diagnostic tool in sleep medicine, essential for identifying various sleep disorders. By capturing physiological signals, including EEG, EOG, EMG, and cardiorespiratory metrics, PSG presents a patient's sleep architecture. However, its dependency on complex equipment and expertise confines its use to specialized clinical settings. Addressing these limitations, our study aims to perform PSG by developing a system that requires only a single EEG measurement. We propose a novel system capable of reconstructing multi-signal PSG from a single-channel EEG based on a masked autoencoder. The masked autoencoder was trained and evaluated using the Sleep-EDF-20 dataset, with mean squared error as the metric for assessing the similarity between original and reconstructed signals. The model demonstrated proficiency in reconstructing multi-signal data. Our results present promise for the development of more accessible and long-term sleep monitoring systems. This suggests the expansion of PSG's applicability, enabling its use beyond the confines of clinics.

Young-Seok Kweon, Gi-Hwan Shin, Heon-Gyu Kwak

Sleep is an essential behavior to prevent the decrement of cognitive, motor, and emotional performance and various diseases. However, it is not easy to fall asleep when people want to sleep. There are various sleep-disturbing factors such as the COVID-19 situation, noise from outside, and light during the night. We aim to develop a personalized sleep induction system based on mental states using electroencephalogram and auditory stimulation. Our system analyzes users' mental states using an electroencephalogram and results of the Pittsburgh sleep quality index and Brunel mood scale. According to mental states, the system plays sleep induction sound among five auditory stimulation: white noise, repetitive beep sounds, rainy sound, binaural beat, and sham sound. Finally, the sleep-inducing system classified the sleep stage of participants with 94.7 percent and stopped auditory stimulation if participants showed non-rapid eye movement sleep. Our system makes 18 participants fall asleep among 20 participants.

Ji-Ha Park, Heon-Gyu Kwak, Gi-Hwan Shin et al.

Brain-computer interface (BCI) research, while promising, has largely been confined to static and fixed environments, limiting real-world applicability. To move towards practical BCI, we introduce a real-time wireless imagined speech electroencephalogram (EEG) decoding system designed for flexibility and everyday use. Our framework focuses on practicality, demonstrating extensibility beyond wired EEG devices to portable, wireless hardware. A user identification module recognizes the operator and provides a personalized, user-specific service. To achieve seamless, real-time operation, we utilize the lab streaming layer to manage the continuous streaming of live EEG signals to the personalized decoder. This end-to-end pipeline enables a functional real-time application capable of classifying user commands from imagined speech EEG signals, achieving an overall 4-class accuracy of 62.00 % on a wired device and 46.67 % on a portable wireless headset. This paper demonstrates a significant step towards truly practical and accessible BCI technology, establishing a clear direction for future research in robust, practical, and personalized neural interfaces.

Jun-Young Kim, Young-Seok Kweon, Gi-Hwan Shin et al.

Adaptive reasoning enables humans to flexibly adjust inference strategies when environmental rules or contexts change, yet its underlying neural dynamics remain unclear. This study investigated the neurophysiological mechanisms of adaptive reasoning using a card-sorting paradigm combined with electroencephalography and compared human performance with that of a multimodal large language model. Stimulus- and feedback-locked analyses revealed coordinated delta-theta-alpha dynamics: early delta-theta activity reflected exploratory monitoring and rule inference, whereas occipital alpha engagement indicated confirmatory stabilization of attention after successful rule identification. In contrast, the multimodal large language model exhibited only short-term feedback-driven adjustments without hierarchical rule abstraction or genuine adaptive reasoning. These findings identify the neural signatures of human adaptive reasoning and highlight the need for brain-inspired artificial intelligence that incorporates oscillatory feedback coordination for true context-sensitive adaptation.

Young-Seok Kweon, Gi-Hwan Shin, Ji-Yong Kim et al.

Conscious state estimation is important in various medical settings, including sleep staging and anesthesia management, to ensure patient safety and optimize health outcomes. Traditional methods predominantly utilize electroencephalography (EEG), which faces challenges such as high sensitivity to noise and the requirement for controlled environments. In this study, we propose the consciousness-ECG transformer that leverages electrocardiography (ECG) signals for non-invasive and reliable conscious state estimation. Our approach employs a transformer with decoupled query attention to effectively capture heart rate variability features that distinguish between conscious and unconscious states. We implemented the conscious state estimation system with real-time monitoring and validated our system on datasets involving sleep staging and anesthesia level monitoring during surgeries. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms baseline models, achieving accuracies of 0.877 on sleep staging and 0.880 on anesthesia level monitoring. Moreover, our model achieves the highest area under curve values of 0.786 and 0.895 on sleep staging and anesthesia level monitoring, respectively. The proposed system offers a practical and robust alternative to EEG-based methods, particularly suited for dynamic clinical environments. Our results highlight the potential of ECG-based consciousness monitoring to enhance patient safety and advance our understanding of conscious states.

Heon-Gyu Kwak, Young-Seok Kweon, Gi-Hwan Shin

In this paper, we propose a Siamese sleep transformer (SST) that effectively extracts features from single-channel raw electroencephalogram signals for robust sleep stage scoring. Despite the significant advances in sleep stage scoring in the last few years, most of them mainly focused on the increment of model performance. However, other problems still exist: the bias of labels in datasets and the instability of model performance by repetitive training. To alleviate these problems, we propose the SST, a novel sleep stage scoring model with a selective batch sampling strategy and self-knowledge distillation. To evaluate how robust the model was to the bias of labels, we used different datasets for training and testing: the sleep heart health study and the Sleep-EDF datasets. In this condition, the SST showed competitive performance in sleep stage scoring. In addition, we demonstrated the effectiveness of the selective batch sampling strategy with a reduction of the standard deviation of performance by repetitive training. These results could show that SST extracted effective learning features against the bias of labels in datasets, and the selective batch sampling strategy worked for the model robustness in training.

Heon-Gyu Kwak, Gi-Hwan Shin, Yeon-Woo Choi et al.

In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework for personalized brain-computer interface (BCI) applications, which can offer an enhanced user experience by customizing services to individual preferences and needs, based on endogenous electroencephalography (EEG) paradigms including motor imagery (MI), speech imagery (SI), and visual imagery. The framework includes two essential components: user identification and intention classification, which enable personalized services by identifying individual users and recognizing their intended actions through EEG signals. We validate the feasibility of our framework using a private EEG dataset collected from eight subjects, employing the ShallowConvNet architecture to decode EEG features. The experimental results demonstrate that user identification achieved an average classification accuracy of 0.995, while intention classification achieved 0.47 accuracy across all paradigms, with MI demonstrating the best performance. These findings indicate that EEG signals can effectively support personalized BCI applications, offering robust identification and reliable intention decoding, especially for MI and SI.

Gi-Hwan Shin, Young-Seok Kweon

Many studies have discussed the difference in brain activity related to encoding and retrieval of working memory (WM) tasks. However, it remains unclear if there is a change in brain activation associated with re-encoding. The main objective of this study was to compare different brain states (rest, encoding, and re-encoding) during the WM task. We recorded brain activity from thirty-seven participants using an electroencephalogram and calculated power spectral density (PSD) and phase-locking value (PLV) for different frequencies. In addition, the difference in phase-amplitude coupling (PAC) between encoding and re-encoding was investigated. Our results showed that alpha PSD decreased as the learning progressed, and theta PLV, beta PLV, and gamma PLV showed differences between brain regions. Also, there was a statistically significant difference in PAC. These findings suggest the possibility of improving the efficiency of learning during re-encoding by understanding the differences in neural correlation related to learning.

Young-Seok Kweon, Gi-Hwan Shin

Sleep has a significant role to maintain our health. However, people have struggled with sleep induction because of noise, emotion, and complicated thoughts. We hypothesized that there was more effective auditory stimulation to induce sleep based on their mental states. We investigated five auditory stimulation: sham, repetitive beep, binaural beat, white noise, and rainy sounds. The Pittsburgh sleep quality index was performed to divide subjects into good and poor sleep groups. To verify the subject's mental states between initiation of sessions, a psychomotor vigilance task and Stanford sleepiness scale (SSS) were performed before auditory stimulation. After auditory stimulation, we asked subjects to report their sleep experience during auditory stimulation. We also calculated alpha dominant duration that was the period that represents the wake period during stimulation. We showed that there were no differences in reaction time and SSS between sessions. It indicated sleep experience is not related to the timeline. The good sleep group fell asleep more frequently than the poor sleep group when they hear white noise and rainy sounds. Moreover, when subjects failed to fall asleep during sham, most subjects fell asleep during rainy sound (Cohen's kappa: -0.588). These results help people to select suitable auditory stimulation to induce sleep based on their mental states.

Young-Eun Lee, Gi-Hwan Shin, Minji Lee et al.

We present a mobile dataset obtained from electroencephalography (EEG) of the scalp and around the ear as well as from locomotion sensors by 24 participants moving at four different speeds while performing two brain-computer interface (BCI) tasks. The data were collected from 32-channel scalp-EEG, 14-channel ear-EEG, 4-channel electrooculography, and 9-channel inertial measurement units placed at the forehead, left ankle, and right ankle. The recording conditions were as follows: standing, slow walking, fast walking, and slight running at speeds of 0, 0.8, 1.6, and 2.0m/s, respectively. For each speed, two different BCI paradigms, event-related potential and steady-state visual evoked potential, were recorded. To evaluate the signal quality, scalp- and ear-EEG data were qualitatively and quantitatively validated during each speed. We believe that the dataset will facilitate BCIs in diverse mobile environments to analyze brain activities and evaluate the performance quantitatively for expanding the use of practical BCIs.

Young-Seok Kweon, Gi-Hwan Shin, Heon-Gyu Kwak et al.

A micro-sleep is a short sleep that lasts from 1 to 30 secs. Its detection during driving is crucial to prevent accidents that could claim a lot of people's lives. Electroencephalogram (EEG) is suitable to detect micro-sleep because EEG was associated with consciousness and sleep. Deep learning showed great performance in recognizing brain states, but sufficient data should be needed. However, collecting micro-sleep data during driving is inefficient and has a high risk of obtaining poor data quality due to noisy driving situations. Night-sleep data at home is easier to collect than micro-sleep data during driving. Therefore, we proposed a deep learning approach using night-sleep EEG to improve the performance of micro-sleep detection. We pre-trained the U-Net to classify the 5-class sleep stages using night-sleep EEG and used the sleep stages estimated by the U-Net to detect micro-sleep during driving. This improved micro-sleep detection performance by about 30\% compared to the traditional approach. Our approach was based on the hypothesis that micro-sleep corresponds to the early stage of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. We analyzed EEG distribution during night-sleep and micro-sleep and found that micro-sleep has a similar distribution to NREM sleep. Our results provide the possibility of similarity between micro-sleep and the early stage of NREM sleep and help prevent micro-sleep during driving.

Gi-Hwan Shin, Young-Seok Kweon, Minji Lee

Memory is an essential element in people's daily life based on experience. So far, many studies have analyzed electroencephalogram (EEG) signals at encoding to predict later remembered items, but few studies have predicted long-term memory only with EEG signals of successful short-term memory. Therefore, we aim to predict long-term memory using deep neural networks. In specific, the spectral power of the EEG signals of remembered items in short-term memory was calculated and inputted to the multilayer perceptron (MLP) and convolutional neural network (CNN) classifiers to predict long-term memory. Seventeen participants performed visuo-spatial memory task consisting of picture and location memory in the order of encoding, immediate retrieval (short-term memory), and delayed retrieval (long-term memory). We applied leave-one-subject-out cross-validation to evaluate the predictive models. As a result, the picture memory showed the highest kappa-value of 0.19 on CNN, and location memory showed the highest kappa-value of 0.32 in MLP. These results showed that long-term memory can be predicted with measured EEG signals during short-term memory, which improves learning efficiency and helps people with memory and cognitive impairments.

Gi-Hwan Shin, Minji Lee, Seong-Whan Lee

The assessment of consciousness and unconsciousness is a challenging issue in modern neuroscience. Consciousness is closely related to memory consolidation in that memory is a critical component of conscious experience. So far, many studies have been reported on memory consolidation during consciousness, but there is little research on memory consolidation during unconsciousness. Therefore, we aim to assess the unconsciousness in terms of memory consolidation using electroencephalogram signals. In particular, we used unconscious state during a nap; because sleep is the only state in which consciousness disappears under normal physiological conditions. Seven participants performed two memory tasks (word-pairs and visuo-spatial) before and after the nap to assess the memory consolidation during unconsciousness. As a result, spindle power in central, parietal, occipital regions during unconsciousness was positively correlated with the performance of location memory. With the memory performance, there was also a negative correlation between delta connectivity and word-pairs memory, alpha connectivity and location memory, and spindle connectivity and word-pairs memory. We additionally observed the significant relationship between unconsciousness and brain changes during memory recall before and after the nap. These findings could help present new insights into the assessment of unconsciousness by exploring the relationship with memory consolidation.

Gi-Hwan Shin, Minji Lee, Hyeong-Jin Kim et al.

Event-related potential (ERP) speller can be utilized in device control and communication for locked-in or severely injured patients. However, problems such as inter-subject performance instability and ERP-illiteracy are still unresolved. Therefore, it is necessary to predict classification performance before performing an ERP speller in order to use it efficiently. In this study, we investigated the correlations with ERP speller performance using a resting-state before an ERP speller. In specific, we used spectral power and functional connectivity according to four brain regions and five frequency bands. As a result, the delta power in the frontal region and functional connectivity in the delta, alpha, gamma bands are significantly correlated with the ERP speller performance. Also, we predicted the ERP speller performance using EEG features in the resting-state. These findings may contribute to investigating the ERP-illiteracy and considering the appropriate alternatives for each user.