  The electroencephalogram (EEG) provides a non-invasive, minimally
restrictive, and relatively low cost measure of mesoscale brain dynamics with
high temporal resolution. Although signals recorded in parallel by multiple,
near-adjacent EEG scalp electrode channels are highly-correlated and combine
signals from many different sources, biological and non-biological, independent
component analysis (ICA) has been shown to isolate the various source generator
processes underlying those recordings. Independent components (IC) found by ICA
decomposition can be manually inspected, selected, and interpreted, but doing
so requires both time and practice as ICs have no particular order or intrinsic
interpretations and therefore require further study of their properties.
Alternatively, sufficiently-accurate automated IC classifiers can be used to
classify ICs into broad source categories, speeding the analysis of EEG studies
with many subjects and enabling the use of ICA decomposition in near-real-time
applications. While many such classifiers have been proposed recently, this
work presents the ICLabel project comprised of (1) an IC dataset containing
spatiotemporal measures for over 200,000 ICs from more than 6,000 EEG
recordings, (2) a website for collecting crowdsourced IC labels and educating
EEG researchers and practitioners about IC interpretation, and (3) the
automated ICLabel classifier. The classifier improves upon existing methods in
two ways: by improving the accuracy of the computed label estimates and by
enhancing its computational efficiency. The ICLabel classifier outperforms or
performs comparably to the previous best publicly available method for all
measured IC categories while computing those labels ten times faster than that
classifier as shown in a rigorous comparison against all other publicly
available EEG IC classifiers.
