Number of Channels Suggested for Inverse Modeling

Hi,

I apologize if this question is answered somewhere in the tutorials, but I scrolled through and couldn’t find anything. I’m completely new to Brainstorm and most EEG processing.

Our lab is relatively new to EEG research and uses a commercial software (NeuroGuide by applied neuroscience inc.) to obtain all of our metrics. The software seems to be more for clinical purposes than research purposes, and while it does provide LORETA functionality for connectivity metrics (coherence, phase amplitude coupling, etc.) it doesn’t allow for customized processing. It’s as simple as removing artifact, clicking “LORETA coherence” and obtaining the averaged values for the recording in a tab-delimited format.

I’d like to move more towards software like Brainstorm and MNE Python, but would need to find the answer to 2 questions before moving forward. If anyone can provide information to the following, it would be appreciated:

  1. Our lab uses electrocaps with 19 sensors. Are 19 sensors generally dense enough for research if using inverse modeling? If not, is there a standard or minimum (64, 128, etc.)?

  2. Has anyone had experience with commercial software such as NeuroGuide, and if so do they have any opinions on its use in research settings (constraints it may have, complaints, etc.)?
    **Our lab doesn’t specialize in EEG research, so I’d just appreciate any feedback. If mentioning an outside software isn’t appropriate for this forum then I can leave this out.

Thanks for the help

Our lab uses electrocaps with 19 sensors. Are 19 sensors generally dense enough for research if using inverse modeling? If not, is there a standard or minimum (64, 128, etc.)?

19 is very sparse… 64 or 128 would be recommended.
There are many publications about the minimum number of electrodes needed for source analysis. Some should be easy to find with google scholar.

Has anyone had experience with commercial software such as NeuroGuide, and if so do they have any opinions on its use in research settings (constraints it may have, complaints, etc.)?

I am not aware of anybody else using this software. Maybe you could ask the company to share with you the contact information of a few of their customers actively involved in research activities?

Our lab doesn’t specialize in EEG research, so I’d just appreciate any feedback. If mentioning an outside software isn’t appropriate for this forum then I can leave this out.

No problem on our end, we are always interested about feedback on how brainstorm compares to commercial software and how to copy new interesting ideas :slight_smile:
But this forum is probably not going to bring you a lot of help for using this program…

Hi Francois and team there

My colleagues using 14 channels of EEG in her research. She wants to use Brainstorm software to analyse her data. What would you say, is it Brainstorm has a limitation for the channels number?

My colleagues using 14 channels of EEG in her research. She wants to use Brainstorm software to analyse her data. What would you say, is it Brainstorm has a limitation for the channels number?

Brainstorm can handle recordings with any number of signals, from 1 to thousands.
However, with a low number of sensors you can't do any source analysis, or even spatial filtering (SSP/ICA). With a high number of signals, you are limited with the memory and computation capacity of your computer.

If your question is "can I do source reconstruction with 14 EEG channels?", it is already addressed above.