The Temple University Hospital EEG Corpus: Electrode Location and Channel Labels

The goal of this report is to describe to users of the TUH EEG Corpus four important concepts that must be understood to correctly retrieve EEG signals from a data file (e.g., an EDF file). The four key concepts described in this document are: (1) physical placement: the location of the electrodes on the scalp, (2) unipolar montage: the differential recording process used to reduce noise, (3) channel labels: the system used to describe the channels, or digital signals, represented in a computer file and (4) bipolar montages: the differential mapping used to accentuate clinically-relevant events in the signal. This report is not intended to be a primer on the electrophysiology of an EEG, which is a subject unto itself, or a tutorial on how neurologists interpret EEGs. This report simply explains how the signal data in an EEG file must be accessed to accurately support clinical applications (e.g., manual interpretation or annotation of an EEG) and research applications (e.g., automatic interpretation using machine learning).