EEG/EP: new techniques

Abstract

The topographic analysis of electrical brain activity consists of the extraction of quantitative features which adequately describe the scalp recorded electrical fields of the brain. In the beginning of brain electrical activity mapping most methods centered mainly around the graphical display of multichannel EEG and evoked potential data. Meanwhile quantitative analysis strategies have been developed, and such methods are applied to topographic EEG and evoked potential data enabling the statistical evaluation of the effects of different experimental conditions as well as the comparison of various clinical populations. Major new analysis techniques comprise the computation of global field power and global dissimilarity for determination of components of evoked potential fields, the segmentation of map series by topographical features, time range analysis, FFT approximation for the spatial analysis of EEG frequency bands as well as correlation analysis and spatial principal components analysis (Spatial PCA). Data from experiments dealing with evoked brain activity will illustrate the application of these quantitative methods that also can be used for the analysis of the spontaneous EEG.