Hierarchical Event Descriptor library schema for EEG data annotation

Abstract

Standardizing terminology to annotate electrophysiological events can improve both computational research and clinical care. Enriching data with standard terms facilitates data exploration, from case studies to mega-analyses. The machine readability of such electrophysiological event annotations is essential for performing automated analyses. The Hierarchical Event Descriptor (HED) framework provides a standard for describing events in neuroscience experiments but does not yet include terms for electrophysiological data features. The Standardized Computer-based Organized Reporting of EEG (SCORE) defines terms for EEG features but is not yet openly available in machine-readable format. This study therefore developed a HED library schema for SCORE: the HED-SCORE library schema. This library schema makes the SCORE terms machine-readable and searchable and extents the standard HED schema with a controlled hierarchical vocabulary to annotate electrophysiological events. We demonstrate that the HED-SCORE library schema can be used to annotate events in EEG data stored in the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS). Clinicians and researchers worldwide can use the HED-SCORE library schema to annotate and compute on human electrophysiological data.