Towards an EEG Search Engine

The current EEG analysis publication workflow mostly documents qualitative descriptions of event-related EEG dynamics. This makes it difficult to look for comparable results in the literature since search options are limited to textual descriptions and/or similar-appearing results depicted in the paper figures. We demonstrate a method for quantitative comparison of source-resolved results (e.g., ERPs, ERSPs) across different EEG studies. Our proposed source-resolved EEG measure search engine receives search queries composed of event-related EEG measures, each associated with an estimated brain source location to be compared using Measure Projection Analysis (MPA) to all records in the search engine database accumulated by automated data analysis workflows applied to data of multiple studies. A similarity-ranked list of events from other studies that have elicited similar EEG dynamics in nearby source-locations is then returned to the user along with their experiment and event metadata. We performed a search query using this method through 52 event-related ERSP measures from four studies for Left Precentral Gyrus source measures similar to an input ERSP pattern associated with RSVP target detection, obtaining results consistent with the EEG literature and giving information about the interpretation of the phenomenon of interest not possible to infer from the single input study.