Independent Components Analysis “Artifact Correction” Distorts EEG Phase in Artifact Free Segments

EEG artifact is defined as any electrical potential that is not produced by the brain, e.g., eye movement or head movement or muscle, 50 Hz-60 Hz line noise, etc. The most commonly used method of artifact elimination from an EEG recording is to delete the parts of the EEG recording that contain artifact and thereby leave the artifact free parts of the recording unchanged. Recently, Independent Components Analysis (ICA) has been used to decompose the original EEG into a set of components and then subjectively identify components that statistically load on one or more Independent Components (ICs) and using a smaller set of ICs then replace the original EEG recording with a different time series referred to as the ICA replacement or ICA-R. The purpose of this study is to mathematically and empirically test the distortion of the artifact free parts of the EEG when using ICA-R to replace the entire EEG digital record. The results of Joint-Time-Frequency-Analysis (JTFA) and the FFT spectral analyses demonstrated that ICA-Replacement of the original EEG produced phase distortions at each and every time point of the recording between all channel pairs. In contrast, the standard method of deleting the segments of an EEG recording that contain artifact did not distort the artifact free segments of the EEG recording. Conclusions are that ICA Replacement (ICA-R) is a severe distortion of the phase differences and time differences of the electrophysiology of the human scalp recorded Electroencephalogram (EEG) and invalidates all subsequent analyses that rely upon the imaginary part of the crossspectrum including scalp coherence, phase and network analyses that are dependent on the physics of electrical and magnetic fields.