Transforming of scalp EEGs with different channel locations by REST for comparative study

Abstract

ObjectiveThe diversity of electrode placement systems brought the problem of channel location harmonization in large-scale electroencephalography (EEG) applications to the forefront. Therefore, our goal was to resolve this problem by introducing and assessing the reference electrode standardization technique (REST) to transform EEGs into a common electrode distribution with computational zero reference at infinity offline. MethodsSimulation and eye-closed resting-state EEG datasets were used to investigate the performance of REST for EEG signals and power configurations. ResultsREST produced small errors (the root mean square error (RMSE): 0.2936–0.4583; absolute errors: 0.2343–0.3657) and high correlations (>0.9) between the estimated signals and true ones. The comparison of configuration similarities in power among various electrode distributions revealed that REST induced infinity reference could maintain a perfect performance similar (>0.9) to that of true one. ConclusionThese results demonstrated that REST transformation could be adopted to resolve the channel location harmonization problem in large-scale EEG applications.