Technical considerations when using the EEG export of the SEDLine Root device

Electroencephalographic (EEG) patient monitoring during general anesthesia can help to assess the real-time neurophysiology of unconscious states. Some monitoring systems like the SEDLine Root allow export of the EEG to be used for retrospective analysis. We show that changes made to the SEDLine display during recording affected the recorded EEG. These changes can strongly impact retrospective analysis of EEG signals. Real-time changes of the feed speed in the SEDLine Root device display modifies the sampling rate of the exported EEG. We used a patient as well as a simulated EEG recording to highlight the effects of the display settings on the extracted EEG. Therefore, we changed EEG feed and amplitude resolution on the display in a systematic manner. To visualize the effects of these changes, we present raw EEG segments and the density spectral array of the recording. Changing the display’s amplitude resolution affects the amplitudes. If the amplitude resolution is too fine, the exported EEG contains clipped amplitudes. If the resolution is too coarse, the EEG resolution becomes too low leading to a low-quality signal making frequency analysis impossible. The proportion of clipped or zero-line data caused by the amplitude setting was > 60% in our sedated patient. Changing the display settings results in undocumented changes in EEG amplitude, sampling rate, and signal quality. The occult nature of these changes could make the analysis of data sets difficult if not invalid. We strongly suggest researchers adequately define and keep the EEG display settings to export good quality EEG and to ensure comparability among patients. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s10877-020-00578-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.