Periodic and aperiodic neural activity displays age-dependent changes across early-to-middle childhood

Electroencephalographic (EEG) data is typically contaminated with non-neural artifacts which can confound the results of experiments. Artifact cleaning approaches are available, but often require time-consuming manual input and significant expertise. Advancements in artifact cleaning often only address a single artifact, are only compared against a small selection of pre-existing methods, and seldom assess whether a proposed advancement improves experimental outcomes. To address these issues, we developed RELAX (the Reduction of Electroencephalographic Artifacts), an automated EEG cleaning pipeline implemented within EEGLAB that reduces all artifact types. RELAX cleans continuous data using Multiple Wiener filtering [MWF] and/or wavelet enhanced independent component analysis [wICA] applied to artifacts identified by ICLabel [wICA_ICLabel]). Several versions of RELAX were tested using three datasets containing a mix of cognitive and resting recordings (N = 213, 60 and 23 respectively). RELAX was compared against six commonly used EEG cleaning approaches across a wide range of artifact cleaning quality metrics, including signal-to-error and artifact-to-residue ratios, measures of remaining blink and muscle activity, and the amount of variance explained by experimental manipulations after cleaning. RELAX with MWF and wICA_ICLabel showed amongst the best performance for cleaning blink and muscle artifacts while still preserving neural signal. RELAX with wICA_ICLabel (and no MWF) may perform better at detecting the effect of experimental manipulations on alpha oscillations in working memory tasks. The pipeline is easy to implement in MATLAB and freely available on GitHub. Given its high cleaning performance, objectivity, and ease of use, we recommend RELAX for data cleaning across EEG studies.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2022/03/10/2022.03.08.483548.full.pdf

Introducing RELAX (the Reduction of Electroencephalographic Artifacts): A fully automated pre-processing pipeline for cleaning EEG data - Part 1: Algorithm and Application to Oscillations

Electroencephalography (EEG) is commonly used to examine neural activity time-locked to the presentation of a stimulus, referred to as an Event-Related Potential (ERP). However, EEG is also influenced by non-neural artifacts, which can confound ERP comparisons. Artifact cleaning can reduce artifacts, but often requires time-consuming manual decisions. Most automated cleaning methods require frequencies <1Hz to be filtered out of the data, so are not recommended for ERPs (which often contain <1Hz frequencies). In our companion article, we introduced RELAX (the Reduction of Electroencephalographic Artifacts), an automated and modular cleaning pipeline that reduces artifacts with Multiple Wiener Filtering (MWF) and/or wavelet enhanced independent component analysis (wICA) applied to artifact components detected with ICLabel (wICA_ICLabel) (Bailey et al., 2022). To evaluate the suitability of RELAX for data cleaning prior to ERP analysis, multiple versions of RELAX were compared to four commonly used EEG cleaning pipelines. Cleaning performance was compared across a range of artifact cleaning metrics and in the amount of variance in ERPs explained by different conditions in a Go-Nogo task. RELAX with MWF and wICA_ICLabel cleaned the data the most effectively and produced amongst the most dependable ERP estimates. RELAX with wICA_ICLabel only or MWF_only may detect experimental effects better for some ERP measures. Importantly, RELAX can high-pass filter data at 0.25Hz, so is applicable to analyses involving ERPs. The pipeline is easy to implement via EEGLAB in MATLAB and is freely available on GitHub. Given its performance, objectivity, and ease of use, we recommend RELAX for EEG data cleaning. The MATLAB code, the supplementary materials, and a simple instruction manual explaining how to implement the RELAX pipeline can be downloaded from https://github.com/NeilwBailey/RELAX/releases. A condition of use of the pipeline is that the version of the pipeline used is referred to as RELAX_[pipeline], for example “RELAX_MWF_wICA” or “RELAX_wICA_ICLabel”, and that the current paper be cited, as well as the dependencies used. These dependencies are likely to include: EEGLAB (Delorme & Makeig, 2004), fieldtrip (Oostenveld et al., 2011), the MWF toolbox (Somers et al., 2019), fastICA (Hyvarinen, 1999), wICA (Castellanos & Makarov, 2006), ICLabel (Pion-Tonachini et al., 2019), and PREP (Bigdely-Shamlo et al., 2015) See our companion article for the application of RELAX to the study of oscillatory power (Bailey et al., 2022).

/pdf/introducing-relax-the-reduction-of-electroencephalographic-3ixie65x.pdf

Introducing RELAX (the Reduction of Electroencephalographic Artifacts): A fully automated pre-processing pipeline for cleaning EEG data – Part 2: Application to Event-Related Potentials

Introducing RELAX: An automated pre-processing pipeline for cleaning EEG data - Part 1: Algorithm and application to oscillations

RELAX part 2: A fully automated EEG data cleaning algorithm that is applicable to Event-Related-Potentials

Sensitive biological markers of non-motor symptoms in Huntingtons disease (HD) are essential for the development and assessment of novel treatments. To this end we used resting state EEG to examine differences in oscillatory activity (analysing the isolated periodic as well as the complete EEG signal) and functional connectivity in 22 people with HD and 20 neurotypical controls. We then assessed the correlations between these neurophysiological markers and clinical measures of apathy and cognitive functioning. Significantly lower theta and greater delta resting state power was seen in the HD group, as well as significantly greater delta connectivity. There was a significant positive correlation between theta power and processing speed, however there were no associations between the neurophysiological and apathy measures. We speculate that these changes in oscillatory power and connectivity reflect ongoing, frontally concentrated degenerative and compensatory processes associated with HD. Our findings support the potential utility of quantitative EEG as a proximate marker for non-motor symptoms in HD.

/pdf/investigating-resting-state-neurophysiological-markers-of-c61t4sai.pdf

N. Bailey

Papers

Introducing RELAX (the Reduction of Electroencephalographic Artifacts): A fully automated pre-processing pipeline for cleaning EEG data - Part 1: Algorithm and Application to Oscillations

Introducing RELAX (the Reduction of Electroencephalographic Artifacts): A fully automated pre-processing pipeline for cleaning EEG data – Part 2: Application to Event-Related Potentials

Introducing RELAX: An automated pre-processing pipeline for cleaning EEG data - Part 1: Algorithm and application to oscillations

RELAX part 2: A fully automated EEG data cleaning algorithm that is applicable to Event-Related-Potentials

Investigating resting state neurophysiological markers of apathy and processing speed in prodromal and early-stage manifest Huntington's disease