Evaluation of Artifact Subspace Reconstruction for Automatic Artifact Components Removal in Multi-Channel EEG Recordings

Objective: Artifact subspace reconstruction (ASR) is an automatic, online-capable, component-based method that can effectively remove transient or large-amplitude artifacts contaminating electroencephalographic (EEG) data. However, the effectiveness of ASR and the optimal choice of its parameter have not been systematically evaluated and reported, especially on actual EEG data. Methods: This paper systematically evaluates ASR on 20 EEG recordings taken during simulated driving experiments. Independent component analysis (ICA) and an independent component classifier are applied to separate artifacts from brain signals to quantitatively assess the effectiveness of the ASR. Results: ASR removes more eye and muscle components than brain components. Even though some eye and muscle components retain after ASR cleaning, the power of their temporal activities is reduced. Study results also showed that ASR cleaning improved the quality of a subsequent ICA decomposition. Conclusions: Empirical results show that the optimal ASR parameter is between 20 and 30, balancing between removing non-brain signals and retaining brain activities. Significance: With an appropriate choice of parameter, ASR can be a powerful and automatic artifact removal approach for offline data analysis or online real-time EEG applications such as clinical monitoring and brain-computer interfaces.