EEG signals convey important information about brain activity both in healthy and pathological conditions. However, they are inherently noisy, which poses significant challenges for accurate analysis and interpretation. Traditional EEG artifact removal methods, while effective, often require extensive expert intervention. This study presents LSTEEG, a novel LSTM-based autoencoder designed for the detection and correction of artifacts in EEG signals. Leveraging deep learning, particularly LSTM layers, LSTEEG captures non-linear dependencies in sequential EEG data. LSTEEG demonstrates superior performance in both artifact detection and correction tasks compared to other state-of-the-art convolutional autoencoders. Our methodology enhances the interpretability and utility of the autoencoder's latent space, enabling data-driven automated artefact removal in EEG its application in downstream tasks. This research advances the field of efficient and accurate multi-channel EEG preprocessing, and promotes the implementation and usage of automated EEG analysis pipelines for brain health applications.

Human electroencephalography (EEG) is a brain monitoring modality that senses cortical neuroelectrophysiological activity in high-temporal resolution. One of the greatest challenges posed in applications of EEG is the unstable signal quality susceptible to inevitable artifacts during recordings. To date, most existing techniques for EEG artifact removal and reconstruction are applicable to offline analysis solely, or require individualized training data to facilitate online reconstruction. We have proposed CLEEGN, a novel convolutional neural network for plug-and-play automatic EEG reconstruction. CLEEGN is based on a subjectindependent pre-trained model using existing data and can operate on a new user without any further calibration. The performance of CLEEGN was validated using multiple evaluations including waveform observation, reconstruction error assessment, and decoding accuracy on well-studied labeled datasets. The results of simulated online validation suggest that, even without any calibration, CLEEGN can largely preserve inherent brain activity and outperforms leading online/offline artifact removal methods in the decoding accuracy of reconstructed EEG data. In addition, visualization of model parameters and latent features exhibit the model behavior and reveal explainable insights related to existing knowledge of neuroscience. We foresee pervasive applications of CLEEGN in prospective works of online plug-and-play EEG decoding and analysis. Since the first record of human electroencephalogram (EEG) performed almost a century ago (in 1924), EEG has been one of the most widely used non-invasive neural modalities that monitors brain activity in high temporal resolution (Koike et al., 2013; Mehta & Parasuraman, 2013; Sejnowski et al., 2014).