Return of the GEDAI: Unsupervised EEG Denoising based on Leadfield Filtering

Abstract Current electroencephalogram (EEG) denoising methods struggle to remove the complex physiological and environmental artifacts typical of real-world settings, which both hinders the isolation of true neural activity and limits the technology’s translational potential. We present the Generalized Eigenvalue De-Artifacting Instrument (GEDAI), a novel algorithm for denoising highly contaminated EEG. GEDAI employs leadfield filtering to selectively remove noise and artifacts that diverge from a theoretically defined EEG forward model. This approach offers unique advantages over existing solutions, including 1) denoising of highly corrupt recordings without “clean” reference data, 2) single-step correction of artifactual epochs and bad channels, 3) unsupervised detection of brain and noise components based on the signal and noise subspace alignment index (SENSAI). In ground-truth simulations with synthetic and empirical EEG contaminated with realistic artifacts (EOG, EMG, noise), GEDAI globally outperformed leading denoising techniques based on principal component analysis (ASR) and independent component analysis (IClabel, MARA), revealing large effect sizes in challenging scenarios with simultaneous artifact mixtures, low signal-to-noise ratio (-9 dB), and high temporal contamination (up to 100%). Its superior denoising also enhanced neurobehavioral predictions, yielding highest accuracies in ERP classification and brain fingerprinting. GEDAI’s autonomy, computational speed and noise-resilience could find future applications in 1) real- world medical , mobile and dry electrode EEG recordings 2) magnetoenecephalography (MEG ) denoising (given the shared M/EEG forward model), and 3) real-time brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). The Matlab code for GEDAI is available as an open-source EEGLAB plugin at https://github.com/neurotuning/GEDAI-master