A method for optimizing EEG electrode number and configuration for signal acquisition in P300 speller systems

•A Gibbs sampling method can identify minimal electrode sets that are important for BCI communication across a subject population without compromising information transfer.•In healthy subjects, a reduced set of four electrodes (PO8, PO7, POZ, CPZ) was found that performed statistically identically to a full montage in an online study.•Reducing and optimizing the number of EEG channels may reduce cost, set-up time, signal bandwidth and computation requirements and improve clinical practicality of P300 speller systems.

ObjectiveThe P300 speller is intended to restore communication to patients with advanced neuromuscular disorders, but clinical implementation may be hindered by several factors, including system setup, burden, and cost. Our goal was to develop a method that can overcome these barriers by optimizing EEG electrode number and placement for P300 studies within a population of subjects.MethodsA Gibbs sampling method was developed to find the optimal electrode configuration given a set of P300 speller data. The method was tested on a set of data from 15 healthy subjects using an established 32-electrode pattern. Resulting electrode configurations were then validated using online prospective testing with a naïve Bayes classifier in 15 additional healthy subjects.ResultsThe method yielded a set of four posterior electrodes (PO8, PO7, POZ, CPZ), which produced results that are likely sufficient to be clinically effective. In online prospective validation testing, no significant difference was found between subjects' performances using the reduced and the full electrode configurations.ConclusionsThe proposed method can find reduced sets of electrodes within a subject population without reducing performance.SignificanceReducing the number of channels may reduce costs, set-up time, signal bandwidth, and computation requirements for practical online P300 speller implementation.