American Clinical Neurophysiology Society Guideline 7: Guidelines for EEG Reporting

This EEG Guideline incorporates the practice of structuring a report of results obtained during routine adult electroencephalography. It is intended to reflect one of the current practices in reporting an EEG and serves as a revision of the previous guideline entitled “Writing an EEG Report.” The goal of this guideline is not only to convey clinically relevant information, but also to improve interrater reliability for clinical and research use by standardizing the format of EEG reports. With this in mind, there is expanded documentation of the patient history to include more relevant clinical information that can affect the EEG recording and interpretation. Recommendations for the technical conditions of the recording are also enhanced to include post hoc review parameters and type of EEG recording. Sleep feature documentation is also expanded upon. More descriptive terms are included for background features and interictal discharges that are concordant with efforts to standardize terminology. In the clinical correlation section, examples of common clinical scenarios are now provided that encourages uniformity in reporting. Including digital samples of abnormal waveforms is now readily available with current EEG recording systems and may be beneficial in augmenting reports when controversial waveforms or important features are encountered.