RESUMEN

OBJECTIVE: The diversity of electrode placement systems brought the problem of channel location harmonization in large-scale electroencephalography (EEG) applications to the forefront. Therefore, our goal was to resolve this problem by introducing and assessing the reference electrode standardization technique (REST) to transform EEGs into a common electrode distribution with computational zero reference at infinity offline. METHODS: Simulation and eye-closed resting-state EEG datasets were used to investigate the performance of REST for EEG signals and power configurations. RESULTS: REST produced small errors (the root mean square error (RMSE): 0.2936-0.4583; absolute errors: 0.2343-0.3657) and high correlations (>0.9) between the estimated signals and true ones. The comparison of configuration similarities in power among various electrode distributions revealed that REST induced infinity reference could maintain a perfect performance similar (>0.9) to that of true one. CONCLUSION: These results demonstrated that REST transformation could be adopted to resolve the channel location harmonization problem in large-scale EEG applications.