Stimulus-induced narrow-band gamma oscillations in humans can be recorded using open-hardware low-cost EEG amplifier

• Published in: PloS one 2023-01, Vol.18 (1), p.e0279881
• Main Authors: Pattisapu, Srividya, Ray, Supratim
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Alzheimer's disease; Amplifiers; Amplifiers (Electronics); Autism; Biology and Life Sciences; Brain; Brain - physiology; Brain Mapping - methods; Brain research; Computer applications; Economic aspects; EEG; Electrodes; Electroencephalography; Electroencephalography - methods; Engineering and Technology; Evoked Potentials; Experiments; Female; Human subjects; Human-computer interface; Humans; Implants; Laws, regulations and rules; Low cost; Male; Measurement; Medicine and Health Sciences; Mental disorders; Mental health; Methods; Neural oscillations; Neurodegenerative diseases; Noise; Oscillations; Product information; Research and Analysis Methods; Schizophrenia; Signal processing; Social Sciences; Technology application
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0279881

Stimulus-induced narrow-band gamma oscillations (30-70 Hz) in human electro-encephalograph (EEG) have been linked to attentional and memory mechanisms and are abnormal in mental health conditions such as autism, schizophrenia and Alzheimer's Disease. However, since the absolute power in EEG decreases rapidly with increasing frequency following a "1/f" power law, and the gamma band includes line noise frequency, these oscillations are highly susceptible to instrument noise. Previous studies that recorded stimulus-induced gamma oscillations used expensive research-grade EEG amplifiers to address this issue. While low-cost EEG amplifiers have become popular in Brain Computer Interface applications that mainly rely on low-frequency oscillations (< 30 Hz) or steady-state-visually-evoked-potentials, whether they can also be used to measure stimulus-induced gamma oscillations is unknown. We recorded EEG signals using a low-cost, open-source amplifier (OpenBCI) and a traditional, research-grade amplifier (Brain Products GmbH), both connected to the OpenBCI cap, in male (N = 6) and female (N = 5) subjects (22-29 years) while they viewed full-screen static gratings that are known to induce two distinct gamma oscillations: slow and fast gamma, in a subset of subjects. While the EEG signals from OpenBCI were considerably noisier, we found that out of the seven subjects who showed a gamma response in Brain Products recordings, six showed a gamma response in OpenBCI as well. In spite of the noise in the OpenBCI setup, the spectral and temporal profiles of these responses in alpha (8-13 Hz) and gamma bands were highly correlated between OpenBCI and Brain Products recordings. These results suggest that low-cost amplifiers can potentially be used in stimulus-induced gamma response detection.