10-20 system (EEG)

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The "10-20" system is a widely used method to describe the location of scalp electrodes in the context of an EEG experiment. It ensures reproduciblility of such tests. This system is based on the relationship between the location of an electrode and the underlying area of cerebral cortex. The "10" and "20" refer to the fact that the actual distances between adjacent electrodes are either 10% or 20% of the total front-back or right-left distance of the skull.

Each site has a letter to identify the lobe and a number to identify the hemisphere location. The letters F, T, C, P and O stand for Frontal, Temporal, Central, Parietal and Occipital respectively. Note that there exists no central lobe, the "C" letter is only used for identification purposes only. A "z" refers to an electrode placed on the midline. Even numbers (2,4,6,8) refer to electrode positions on the right hemisphere, whereas odd numbers (1,3,5,7) refer to those on the left hemisphere.

Two anatomical landmarks are used for the essential positioning of the EEG electrodes: first, the nasion which is the point between the forehead and the nose; second, the inion which is the lowest point of the skull from the back of the head and is normally indicated by a prominent bump.

When recording a more detailed EEG with more electrodes, extra electrodes are added utilizing the spaces in-between the existing 10-20 system. This new electrode-naming-system is more complicated giving rise to the Modified Combinatorial Nomenclature (MCN). This MCN system uses 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 for the left hemisphere which represents 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50% of the inion-to-nasion distance respectively. The introduction of extra letters allows the naming of extra electrode sites. Note that these new letters do not necessarily refer to an area on the underlying cerebral cortex.