Simultaneous Dry and Gel-Based High-Density Electroencephalography Recordings

Evaluations of new dry, high-density EEG caps have only been performed so far with serial measurements and not with simultaneous (parallel) measurements. For a first comparison of gel-based and dry electrode performance in simultaneous high-density EEG measurements, we developed a new EEG cap comprising 64 gel-based and 64 dry electrodes and performed simultaneous measurements on ten volunteers. We analyzed electrode-skin impedances, resting state EEG, triggered eye blinks, and visual evoked potentials (VEPs). To overcome the issue of different electrode positions in the comparison of simultaneous measurements, we performed spatial frequency analysis of the simultaneously measured EEGs using spatial harmonic analysis (SPHARA). The impedances were 516 +/- 429 kOhm (mean +/- std) for the dry electrodes and 14 +/- 8 kOhm for the gel-based electrodes. For the dry EEG electrodes, we obtained a channel reliability of 77%. We observed no differences between dry and gel-based recordings for the alpha peak frequency and the alpha power amplitude, as well as for the VEP peak amplitudes and latencies. For the VEP, the RMSD and the correlation coefficient between the gel-based and dry recordings were 1.7 +/- 0.7 mu V and 0.97 +/- 0.03, respectively. We observed no differences in the cumulative power distributions of the spatial frequency components for the N75 and P100 VEP peaks. The differences for the N145 VEP peak were attributed to the different noise characteristics of gel-based and dry recordings. In conclusion, we provide evidence for the equivalence of simultaneous dry and gel-based high-density EEG measurements.