The Role of EEG Electrical Reference in the Assessment of Functional Brain-Heart Interplay: A Preliminary Study

Recent studies have proposed computational models for a functional brain-heart interplay (BHI) assessment based on electroencephalography (EEG). Nevertheless, the role of the EEG electrical reference on such BHI estimates has not been investigated yet. Here we present a pilot study assessing BHI in 4 minutes resting-state in 10 healthy subjects through methods including heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEP) and oscillations, Maximal Information Coefficient, and our recently proposed model based on Synthetic Data Generation (SDG). EEG signals were re-referenced to the Cz channel, common average, mastoids, and Laplacian. Results for EEG power in the alpha band indicate that the most significant differences between BHI methods are with the Laplacian reference while a higher agreement exists between HEP and SDG approaches.