Increasing accessibility to a large brain–computer interface dataset: Curation of physionet EEG motor movement/imagery dataset for decoding and classification

A reliable motor imagery (MI) brain–computer interface (BCI) requires accurate decoding, which in turn requires model calibration using electroencephalography (EEG) signals from subjects executing or imagining the execution of movements. Although the PhysioNet EEG Motor Movement/Imagery Dataset is currently the largest EEG dataset in the literature, relatively few studies have used it to decode MI trials. In the present study, we curated and cleaned this dataset to store it in an accessible format that is convenient for quick exploitation, decoding, and classification using recent integrated development environments. We dropped six subjects owing to anomalies in EEG recordings and pre-possessed the rest, resulting in 103 subjects spanning four MI and four motor execution tasks. The annotations were coded to correspond to different tasks using numerical values. The resulting dataset is stored in both MATLAB structure and CSV files to ensure ease of access and organization. We believe that improving the accessibility of this dataset will help EEG-based MI-BCI decoding and classification, enabling more reliable real-life applications. The convenience and ease of access of this dataset may therefore lead to improvements in cross-subject classification and transfer learning.