Emulating conventional disc electrode with the outer ring of the tripolar concentric ring electrode in phantom and human electroencephalogram data

Conventional electroencephalography (EEG) with disc electrodes has major drawbacks including poor spatial resolution, selectivity and low signal-to-noise ratio that critically limit its use. Concentric ring electrodes are a promising alternative with potential to improve all of the aforementioned aspects significantly. In our previous work, the tripolar concentric ring electrode (TCRE) was successfully used in a wide range of applications demonstrating its superiority to conventional disc electrodes, in particular, in accuracy of Laplacian estimation (tEEG). For applications that may benefit from simultaneous recording of EEG and tEEG in this paper we propose to use the signal from the outer ring of the TCRE as an emulation (eEEG) of EEG recorded using conventional disc electrodes. This will allow us to record EEG emulation from the exact same locations at the exact same time as the tEEG using a single recording system. Time domain neuronal signal synchrony was measured using cross-correlation in phantom and human experiments suggesting the potential of eEEG as an emulation of EEG.