What do intracerebral electrodes measure?

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Highlights

  • The measurements of intracerebral macro-electrodes are not affected in an important way by the area of the contacts.

  • The width of the gap between the electrode and the functional cortex is the most important parameter defining the sensitivity.

  • Sensitivity of intracerebral channel decays with square of distance to small generators, but less rapidly for extended generators.

Abstract

Objective

Gain insight and improve our interpretation of measurements from intracerebral electrodes. Determine if interpretation of intracerebral EEG is dependent on electrode characteristics.

Methods

We use intracerebral EEG measurements differing only in the recording electrodes (Dixi or homemade electrodes), and numerical simulations to determine the spatial sensitivity of intracerebral electrodes and its dependence on several parameters.

Results

There is a difference in the high frequency (>20 Hz) power depending on the electrode type, which cannot be explained by the different contact sizes or distance between contacts. Simulations show that the width of the gap between electrode and brain and the extent of the generators have an effect on sensitivity, while other parameters are less important.

Conclusions

The sensitivity of intracerebral electrodes is not affected in an important way by the dimensions of the contacts, but depends on the extent of generators. The unusual insertion technique of homemade electrodes resulting in a large gap between functional brain and electrodes, explains the observed signal difference.

Significance

Numerical simulation is a useful tool in the choice or design of intracerebral electrodes, and increases our understanding of their measurements. The interpretation of intracerebral EEG is not affected by differences between typical commercially available electrodes.

Introduction

Intracerebral EEG (iEEG) is routinely used for presurgical evaluation in pharmaco-refractory focal epilepsy patients (Kovac et al., 2017, Nagahama et al., 2018, Wasade and Spanaki, 2019). Typically, not all channels in a patient record epileptic activity. Thus, iEEG also provides an invaluable tool for research as the only source of human intracerebral physiological recordings (Engel et al., 2005, Mukamel and Fried, 2012, Frauscher et al., 2018a, von Ellenrieder et al., 2020). Two types of electrodes exist for recording iEEG, cortical grids placed on the surface of the brain, providing a dense covering of the top of the gyri, and intracerebral electrodes that are inserted in the brain resulting in a sparser covering of the gyri but allowing for the sampling of sulci and deeper structures.

In a previous publication we studied the physiologic high frequency activity above 80 Hz, recorded with intracerebral electrodes in a large number of channels selected from different focal epilepsy patients (Frauscher et al., 2018b). Two different intracerebral electrodes had been used to record these signals, commercial Dixi electrodes (Dixi Medical, France) and Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) home-made (HM) electrodes. We were surprised to find differences in some characteristics of the signal depending on the electrode type, since this had not been observed at frequencies of up to 20 Hz (Frauscher et al., 2018a). This frequency dependent difference between electrodes is unexpected, and prompted us to investigate the issue in more depth.

In this study we aim to gain insight and improve our interpretation of measurements from intracerebral electrodes by using a combination of measured data and numerical simulations. The measured data is available for download through the LORIS platform (Das et al., 2016) as part of the MNI Open iEEG Atlas (https://mni-open-ieegatlas.research.mcgill.ca/). The numerical simulations carried out with the Boundary Elements Method (Brebbia and Dominguez, 1992) are an improvement over an existing model (von Ellenrieder et al., 2012). The Matlab (Mathworks, USA) code is available at Zenodo (https://doi.org//10.5281/zenodo.4044274). We also use these tools to explain the difference in the signals that are recorded with different types of electrodes, and show that differences between typical commercially available electrodes do not affect the sensitivity of iEEG measurements in a significant way.

Section snippets

Characterization of measured signals

We used the high sampling-frequency dataset available for download from the MNI Open iEEG Atlas. This dataset corresponds to recordings from channels with physiologic activity from many different focal epilepsy patients with a duration of 20 min, acquired during non rapid-eye-movement sleep (sleep stages N2 and N3, analyzed often for epileptic interictal activity). We limited our analysis to the recordings from the Montreal Neurological Institute, in order to compare iEEG signals acquired with

Characterization of the signals

The high sampling frequency dataset of the MNI Open iEEG Atlas contains 295 bipolar channels recorded with Dixi electrodes and 247 with HM electrodes, both recorded at the MNI with the same equipment and a sampling rate of 2 kHz. Thirty-five channels from two patients recorded with Dixi electrodes had a different antialiasing filter setting (300 Hz instead of 600 Hz cut-off frequency) and were excluded from the general PDS analysis but kept in the rest of the analyses.

We computed the median PSD

Discussion

Through the use of measurement and simulations we characterized the effect of different parameters in the sensitivity profile and performance of iEEG electrodes, and explained the difference between two intracerebral electrode types.

Declaration of Competing Interest

None of the authors have potential conflicts of interest to be disclosed.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Canadian Institute of Health Research (grant FDN-143208).

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