10-20 system



The 10–20 system or International 10–20 system is an internationally recognized method to describe and apply the location of scalp electrodes in the context of an EEG test or experiment. This method was developed to ensure standardized reproducibility so that a subject's studies could be compared over time and subjects could be compared to each other. 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 lobes, respectively. Note that there exists no central lobe; the "C" letter is used only for identification purposes. A "z" (zero) 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. In addition, the letter codes A, Pg and Fp identify the earlobes, nasopharyngeal and frontal polar sites respectively.

Two anatomical landmarks are used for the essential positioning of the EEG electrodes: first, the nasion which is the distinctly depressed area between the eyes, just above the bridge of 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 using the 10% division, which fills in intermediate sites halfway between those of 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 letter codes allows the naming of intermediate electrode sites. Note that these new letter codes do not necessarily refer to an area on the underlying cerebral cortex. The new letter codes for intermediate sites are: AF – intermediate between Fp and F, FC – between F and C, FT – between F and T, CP – between C and P, TP – between T and P, PO – between P and O. Also, the MCN system renames four points of the 10–20 system—T3, T4, T5 and T6—asT7, T8, P7 and P8 respectively.