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Data-driven re-referencing of intracranial EEG based on independent component analysis (ICA)

Michelmann, Sebastian, Treder, Matthias S., Griffiths, Benjamin, Kerrén, Casper, Roux, Frédéric, Wimber, Maria, Rollings, David, Sawlani, Vijay, Chelvarajah, Ramesh, Gollwitzer, Stephanie, and others. (2018) Data-driven re-referencing of intracranial EEG based on independent component analysis (ICA). Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 307 . pp. 125-137. ISSN 0165-0270. (doi:10.1016/j.jneumeth.2018.06.021) (KAR id:67587)

Abstract

Background: Intracranial recordings from patients implanted with depth electrodes are a valuable source of information in neuroscience. They allow for the unique opportunity to record brain activity with high spatial and temporal resolution. A common pre-processing choice in stereotactic EEG (S-EEG) is to re-reference the data with a bipolar montage. In this, each channel is subtracted from its neighbor, to reduce commonalities between channels and isolate activity that is spatially confined.

New Method: We challenge the assumption that bipolar reference effectively performs this task. To extract local activity, the distribution of the signal source of interest, interfering distant signals, and noise need to be considered. Referencing schemes with fixed coefficients can decrease the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the data, they can lead to mislocalization of activity and consequently to misinterpretation of results. We propose to use Independent Component Analysis (ICA), to derive filter coefficients that reflect the statistical dependencies of the data at hand.

Results: We describe and demonstrate this on human S-EEG recordings. In a simulation with real data, we quantitatively show that ICA outperforms the bipolar referencing operation in sensitivity and importantly in specificity when revealing local time series from the superposition of neighboring channels.

Comparison with Existing Method: We argue that ICA already performs the same task that bipolar referencing pursues, namely undoing the linear superposition of activity and will identify activity that is local.

Conclusions: When investigating local sources in human S-EEG, ICA should be preferred over re-referencing the data with a bipolar montage.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2018.06.021
Uncontrolled keywords: Independent component analysis, Intracranial EEG, Referencing, Preprocessing, Bipolar reference, Depth electrodes, Neuroscience, Electroencephalography
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics (inc Computing science) > QA 75 Electronic computers. Computer science
R Medicine
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences > School of Computing
Depositing User: Howard Bowman
Date Deposited: 11 Jul 2018 08:26 UTC
Last Modified: 09 Dec 2022 05:31 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/67587 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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