Intracranial electroencephalography (intracranial EEG; iEEG) has widely been used in the field of human neuroscience, due to its high signal-to-noise ratio, spatial and temporal resolution, and ability to record from deep brain structures. We introduce a research-purpose acquisition framework for high-resolution iEEG that integrates with the hospital setting to securely and effortlessly route large amounts of neurophysiological data.

Human neuroscience research has greatly benefited from the multi-electrode, multi-day EEG collected from neuroelectrophysiological studies from people with refractory epilepsy. While a sampling rate below 2 kHz may be sufficient for current clinical practice, in which EEG is visually inspected, it may not be sufficient for development of computational methods and research studies. To routinely collect higher resolution data than the clinical standard, additional technical development would be necessary.

Neuroelectrophysiology from intracranial electrodes implanted for clinical neuromonitoring sessions were simultaneously and independently collected from the clinical and research ports of a clinical acquisition system. Pocket-sized routers were used to deploy an encrypted network tunnel that transmitted 10 kHz iEEG data of up to 256 electrodes from the clinical acquisition system in the patient room to a research computer located in the hospital server room.

Since September 2017, we have recruited eligible patients undergoing iEEG clinical neuromonitoring studies at the adult and pediatric Stanford hospitals. As of October 2021, over 140 iEEG studies have routinely been recorded from more than 60 adults and children each, resulting in over 200 TB (800+ days) of neuroelectrophysiology data.

Our iEEG data acquisition system uses an “invisible platform” approach, such that research hardware leaves a footprint as small as possible with minimal interference to the clinical workflow. This acquisition infrastructure is a potential solution towards building a standardized EEG data repository to advance neuroscience research.