LETTER Communicated by Emery Brown Sequential Monte Carlo Point-Process Estimation of Kinematics from Neural Spiking Activity for Brain-Machine Interfaces

Many decoding algorithms for brain machine interfaces ’ (BMIs) estimate hand movement from binned spike rates, which do not fully exploit the resolution contained in spike timing and may exclude rich neural dy-namics from the modeling. More recently, an adaptive filtering method based on a Bayesian approach to reconstruct the neural state from the observed spike times has been proposed. However, it assumes and prop-agates a gaussian distributed state posterior density, which in general is too restrictive. We have also proposed a sequential Monte Carlo es-timation methodology to reconstruct the kinematic states directly from the multichannel spike trains. This letter presents a systematic testing of this algorithm in a simulated neural spike train decoding experiment and then in BMI data. Compared to a point-process adaptive filtering algorithm with a linear observation model and a gaussian approximation (the counterpart for point processes of the Kalman filter), our sequential Monte Carlo estimationmethodology exploits a detailed encodingmodel (tuning function) derived for each neuron from training data. However, this added complexity is translated into higher performance with real data. To deal with the intrinsic spike randomness in online modeling, several synthetic spike trains are generated from the intensity function estimated from the neurons and utilized as extra model inputs in an attempt to decrease the variance in the kinematic predictions. The perfor-manceof the sequentialMonteCarlo estimationmethodologyaugmented with this synthetic spike input provides improved reconstruction, whic