Artifacts during short-term interictal electroencephalographic recording in dogs

The electroencephalogram (EEG) is an electrodiagnostic technique widely used in both scientific research and clinical medicine. It makes it possible to study the neurophysiology of brain activity by recording real-time changes in electrical potential produced by cortical activation. The importance of EEG in diagnosing canine epilepsy demonstrates its usefulness when the owner's description of crises is not clear or when the episodes cannot be differentiated from behavioral or cardiac disorders. However, EEG recordings also often record electrical activity from sources other than the brain, which may interfere with the clinical event-related signal. This activity is known as artifactual electrical activity, and the signal changes recorded in these cases corrupt the trace when they are superimposed on brain activity or even, in some cases, mimic pathologic abnormalities. The first step in analyzing and interpreting EEG traces is to recognize artifacts and other specific transient events. This retrospective study set out to ascertain whether artifacts comparable to those described in humans are observed in protocols used to perform short-term interictal EEG for canine epilepsy and how these can be classified.