Effective Transcutaneous Auricular Stimulation of the Vagus Nerve Stimulation Artifact Removal for Accurate Event-Related Potentials Analysis and Neural Signal Integrity.

Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) has gained growing attention as a promising neuromodulation tool for influencing brain function. However, its efficacy remains a subject of debate within the field. Another challenge is the interference caused by stimulation-induced artifacts in electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings, potentially distorting the true neural responses. This study compares the P300 response elicited during oddball tasks under taVNS and non-taVNS conditions. Using a modeling-based artifact removal method developed in our previous study, we demonstrate that the recovered P300 waveform from the taVNS condition closely resembles that of the non-taVNS condition, thereby supporting the validity of the artifact removal approach.Clinical Relevance- This study demonstrates that the artifact-corrected P300 response under taVNS is statistically comparable to the non-taVNS condition in continuous sessions with the correlation of 0.83, 0.82, and 0.91 for Fz, Cz, and Pz, respectively, with all the p-values < 0.001 in target conditions. These findings validate that the artifact removal process does not introduce significant differences in the event-related potentials characteristic, improving the accuracy and reliability of EEG-based assessments of taVNS-induced neuromodulation. Notably, taVNS has been explored as a non-invasive treatment for various neurological and psychiatric disorders, including depression and epilepsy.