A comparison of headnet electrode arrays for electrical impedance tomography of the human head

Three types of commercially available headnet electrode arrays, designed for use in EEG, and conventional EEG Ag/AgCl cup electrodes were tested on human subjects, and a realistic, saline-filled head-shaped tank was prepared with vegetable skin to simulate human skin in order to determine the optimum electrode system for electrical impedance tomography (EIT) of the human head. Impedance changes during EIT acquisition were produced in healthy volunteers during a finger-thumb apposition task and in tanks by the insertion of a Perspex rod. Signal-to-baseline noise, measured from raw EIT data, was 2.3 +/- 0.3 and 2.3 +/- 0.2 for the human and tank data, respectively. In both the human and tank experiments, a commercial hydrogel elasticated electrode headnet produced the least amount of baseline noise, and was the only headnet in the human data with noise levels acceptable for EIT imaging. Image quality measured in the tank was similar for most of the headnets tested, except that the EEG electrodes produced a higher positional error and electrodes in a geodesic elasticated net produced images with worse subjective image quality. Overall, the hydrogel elasticated headnet was judged to be the most suitable for human neuroimaging with EIT.