Extraction of the Intracranial Component from the Rheoencephalographic Signal: A New Approach

The well-known inherent artifact on the rheoencephalogram (REG) caused by the pulsatility of the scalp blood flow left the REG out of the clinical practice. In fact, depending on the selected electrode arrangement, the measurement of the brain impedance changes time-locked with the heartbeat can be completely buried on that of the scalp. In this work, a novel mathematical method based on the physiological differences between the brain and scalp perfusions is proposed to extract the intracranial information from REG. This method is experimentally applied to REG signals recorded at five electrode positions and results are compared with those derived from our previous theoretical works. Intracranial components extracted from the REG signals are consistent with the stated hypothesis and reproduce the unexpected results obtained with our theoretical models. Although further studies would be needed, the evidences found in this work suggest that the method proposed in this work extracts the intracranial information from the REG signal