Combination of spatial and temporal de-noising and artifact reduction techniques in multi-channel dry EEG

Milana Komosar^1*Gabriella Tamburro^2,3Uwe Graichen⁴Silvia Comani^2,3Jens Haueisen¹

• ¹Technische Universität Ilmenau, Ilmenau, Germany
• ²Behavioral Imaging and Neural Dynamics Center, G. d'Annunzio University of Chieti–Pescara, Chieti, Italy
• ³Department of Neuroscience, Imaging and Clinical Sciences, University of Studies G. d'Annunzio Chieti and Pescara, Chieti, Italy
• ⁴Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences, Krems an der Donau, Lower Austria, Austria

Dry electroencephalography (EEG) allows for recording cortical activity in ecological scenarios with a high channel count, but it is often more prone to artifacts as compared to gel-based EEG. Spatial harmonic analysis (SPHARA) and ICA-based methods (Fingerprint and ARCI) have been separately used in previous studies for dry EEG de-noising and physiological artifact reduction. Here, we investigate if the combination of these techniques further improves EEG signal quality. For this purpose, we also introduced an improved version of SPHARA. Dry 64-channel EEG was recorded from 11 healthy volunteers during a motor performance paradigm (left and right hand, feet, and tongue movements). EEG signals were denoised separately using Fingerprint + ARCI, SPHARA, a combination of these two methods, and a combination of these two methods including an improved SPHARA version. The improved version of SPHARA includes an additional zeroing of artifactual jumps in single channels before application of SPHARA. The EEG signal quality after application of each denoising method was calculated by means of standard deviation (SD), signal to noise ratio (SNR), and root mean square deviation (RMSD), and a generalized linear mixed effects (GLME) model was used to identify significant changes of these parameters and quantify the changes in the EEG signal quality. The grand average values of SD improved from 9.76 (reference preprocessed EEG) to 8.28, 7.91, 6.72, and 6.15 µV for Fingerprint + ARCI, SPHARA, Fingerprint + ARCI + SPHARA, and Fingerprint + ARCI + improved SPHARA, respectively. Similarly, the RMSD values improved from 4.65 to 4.82, 6.32, and 6.90 µV, and the SNR values changed from 2.31 to 1.55, 4.08, and 5.56 dB. Our results demonstrate the different performance aspects of Fingerprint + ARCI and SPHARA, artifact reduction and de-noising techniques that complement each other. We also demonstrated that a combination of these techniques yields superior performance in the reduction of artifacts and noise in dry EEG recordings, which can be extended to infant EEG and adult MEG applications.