Neural Brain Fields: A NeRF-Inspired Approach for Generating Nonexistent EEG Electrodes

Abstract

Electroencephalography (EEG) data present unique modeling challenges because recordings vary in length, exhibit very low signal to noise ratios, differ significantly across participants, drift over time within sessions, and are rarely available in large and clean datasets. Consequently, developing deep learning methods that can effectively process EEG signals remains an open and important research problem. To tackle this problem, this work presents a new method inspired by Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). In computer vision, NeRF techniques train a neural network to memorize the appearance of a 3D scene and then uses its learned parameters to render and edit the scene from any viewpoint. We draw an analogy between the discrete images captured from different viewpoints used to learn a continuous 3D scene in NeRF, and EEG electrodes positioned at different locations on the scalp, which are used to infer the underlying representation of continuous neural activity. Building on this connection, we show that a neural network can be trained on a single EEG sample in a NeRF style manner to produce a fixed size and informative weight vector that encodes the entire signal. Moreover, via this representation we can render the EEG signal at previously unseen time steps and spatial electrode positions. We demonstrate that this approach enables continuous visualization of brain activity at any desired resolution, including ultra high resolution, and reconstruction of raw EEG signals. Finally, our empirical analysis shows that this method can effectively simulate nonexistent electrodes data in EEG recordings, allowing the reconstructed signal to be fed into standard EEG processing networks to improve performance.