Subhairline EEG in neurocritical care: use and limitations through illustrative cases

Subhairline electroencephalography (EEG) is a limited-montage EEG with applications in epilepsy and neurocritical care. It has potential advantages in resource-limited settings and may help in the early diagnosis and management of seizures and status epilepticus while providing real-time electrophysiological monitoring. It has several important technical limitations such as reduced spatial coverage, low sampling rate, inadequate bit depth and review software with limited features. Clinicians must carefully consider these limitations for proper interpretation and so avoid diagnoses based on false positives or false negatives. We present six cases using subhairline EEG and their corresponding 10-20 EEG recordings to help in pattern recognition and to highlight the usefulness and limitations of this technique.