RELAX-Jr: An Automated Pre-Processing Pipeline for Developmental EEG Recordings

Automated EEG pre-processing pipelines provide several key advantages over traditional manual data cleaning approaches; primarily, they are less time-intensive and remove potential experimenter error/bias. Automated pipelines also require fewer technical expertise as they remove the need for manual artifact identification. We recently developed the fully automated Reduction of Electroencephalographic Artifacts (RELAX) pipeline and demonstrated its performance in cleaning EEG data recorded from adult populations. Here, we introduce the RELAX-Jr pipeline, which was adapted from RELAX to be designed specifically for pre- processing of data collected from children. RELAX-Jr implements multi-channel Wiener filtering (MWF) and/or wavelet-enhanced independent component analysis (wICA) combined with the adjusted-ADJUST automated independent component classification algorithm to identify and reduce all artifacts using algorithms adapted to optimally identify artifacts in EEG recordings taken from children. Using a dataset of resting-state EEG recordings (N = 136) from children spanning early-to-middle childhood (4-12 years), we assessed the cleaning performance of RELAX-Jr using a range of metrics including signal-to-error ratio, artifact-to-residue ratio, ability to reduce blink and muscle contamination, and differences in estimates of alpha power between eyes-open and eyes-closed recordings. We also compared the performance of RELAX- Jr against four publicly available automated cleaning pipelines. We demonstrate that RELAX-Jr provides strong cleaning performance across a range of metrics, supporting its use as an effective and fully automated cleaning pipeline for neurodevelopmental EEG data.