24 25 26 2 1. Abstract 27Background: To probe the functional role of brain oscillations, transcranial alternating current 28 stimulation (tACS) has proven to be a useful neuroscientific tool. Because of the huge tACS-caused 29 artifact in electroencephalography (EEG) signals, tACS-EEG studies have been mostly limited to 30 compare brain activity between recordings before and after concurrent tACS. Critically, attempts to 31 suppress the artifact in the data cannot assure that the entire artifact is removed while brain activity 32 is preserved. The current study aims to evaluate the feasibility of specific artifact correction 33 techniques to clean tACS-contaminated EEG data.
34New Method: In the first experiment, we used a phantom head to have full control over the signal 35 to be analyzed. Driving pre-recorded human brain-oscillation signals through a dipolar current 36 source within the phantom, we simultaneously applied tACS and compared the performance of 37 different artifact-correction techniques: sine subtraction, template subtraction, and signal-space 38 projection (SSP). In the second experiment, we combined tACS and EEG on a human subject to 39 validate the best-performing data-correction approach.
40Results: The tACS artifact was highly attenuated by SSP in the phantom and the human EEG; thus, 41 we were able to recover the amplitude and phase of the oscillatory activity. In the human experiment, 42 event-related desynchronization could be restored after correcting the artifact.
43Comparison with existing methods: The best results were achieved with SSP, which outperformed 44 sine subtraction and template subtraction. 45 Conclusions: Our results demonstrate the feasibility of SSP by applying it to human tACS-EEG 46 data. 47 48 Keywords: 49 Electroencephalography, transcranial alternating current stimulation, tACS, artifact, signal space 50 projection, phantom head 51 52 3 2. Introduction 53 The goal of transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) is often the modulation of oscillatory 54 brain activity and the concurrent demonstration of behavioral consequences of the intervention 55 (Herrmann et al., 2013). Thus far, most studies combining tACS with electroencephalography 56 (EEG) have demonstrated effects on oscillatory brain activity only by comparing the EEG before 57 and after tACS (Zaehle et al. 2010; Vossen et al. 2015; Kasten and Herrmann 2017), because EEG 58 data recorded during stimulation is contaminated by the huge tACS-generated artifact. As a 59 workaround, behavioral effects found during application of tACS have been interpreted as a proxy 60 of changes of brain oscillations (Polanía et al. 2012; Neuling et al. 2012; Cecere et al. 2015). 61 In the case of magnetoencephalography (MEG), the correction of the tACS artifact is simpler than 62 in EEG since the MEG sensors are not connected to the tACS electrodes via the skin (Neuling et 63 al., 2015). The issue of tACS artifact correction in MEG data is discussed elsewhere (Neuling et al. 64 2015, 2017; Noury et al. ...