BiND: A Neural Discriminator-Decoder for Accurate Bimanual Trajectory Prediction in Brain-Computer Interfaces

Abstract: Decoding bimanual hand movements from intracortical recordings remains a critical challenge for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), due to overlapping neural representations and nonlinear interlimb interactions. We introduce BiND (Bimanual Neural Discriminator-Decoder), a two-stage model that first classifies motion type (unimanual left, unimanual right, or bimanual) and then uses specialized GRU-based decoders, augmented with a trial-relative time index, to predict continuous 2D hand velocities. We benchmark BiND against six state-of-the-art models (SVR, XGBoost, FNN, CNN, Transformer, GRU) on a publicly available 13-session intracortical dataset from a tetraplegic patient. BiND achieves a mean $R^2$ of 0.76 ($\pm$0.01) for unimanual and 0.69 ($\pm$0.03) for bimanual trajectory prediction, surpassing the next-best model (GRU) by 2% in both tasks. It also demonstrates greater robustness to session variability than all other benchmarked models, with accuracy improvements of up to 4% compared to GRU in cross-session analyses. This highlights the effectiveness of task-aware discrimination and temporal modeling in enhancing bimanual decoding.