How CAN-BIND is Using Brain Waves to Unlock Better Depression Treatments
November 3, 2025
CAN-BIND researchers have taken a significant step toward making studies on depression more reliable and comparable by developing a standardized way to collect and analyze electroencephalography (EEG) data across multiple sites. The goal is to pave the way for large-scale biomarker-informed clinical trials, where objective brain-based markers may help guide diagnosis and treatment of depression.
What is EEG and Why Does It Matter?
Electroencephalography (EEG) is a non-invasive method that records electrical activity from the brain using sensors placed on the scalp. It captures moment-to-moment brain signals, which can reflect how different brain regions are communicating or functioning. Because it is relatively inexpensive and widely available, EEG is a promising tool for identifying brain-based biomarkers related to mental health conditions like depression.
Until now, a major obstacle has been the lack of consistency in how EEG data are recorded and processed across different research sites. Differences in equipment, procedures, or data cleaning can produce variability that obscures true biological signals.
CAN-BIND’s Approach to Studying Brain Activity in Depression
This team of CAN‑BIND researchers set out to build a standard pipeline for EEG in multi-site depression research. This involved:
- Harmonizing infrastructure, including equipment and settings, across sites.
- Establishing consistent procedures for data collection, including how EEG is recorded.
- Developing toolboxes with automated software to clean EEG data and ensure only high-quality, comparable signals are used for analysis
Why This Matters for Depression Research
By standardizing EEG methods, studies can be aggregated more reliably across sites. This increases the chance of identifying robust EEG biomarkers, brain-based signals tied to depression diagnosis, severity, or treatment response. In practice, this could help:
- Predict which patients will respond to a given treatment.
- Detect depression or relapse earlier and more objectively.
- Track brain function over time or across treatment trials in a consistent way.
“While there have been attempts to standardize magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in multi-site studies, the incorporation of large-scale comprehensive EEG databases and standardized EEG collection methods have lagged behind. Nevertheless, the few large-scale multi-site initiatives that have collected EEG data in their biomarker discovery program, have demonstrated high potentials for EEG biomarkers and their translation to clinical practice. In general, EEG has become a promising tool in mental health biomarker research.”
Advantages of the Standardized Approach
Consistency and reliability reduce variability introduced by different equipment or procedures. Scalability enables combining data from multiple clinics, studies, or regions, boosting sample size and statistical power. Accessibility means EEG is relatively affordable, non-invasive, and widely available, making it feasible for broader clinical or research use.
Challenges and What to Keep in Mind
Even with standard protocols, EEG is sensitive to noise. Movement, environment, or electrode placement can still affect data quality. Biomarkers identified through EEG still require careful validation because it is unclear which patterns are truly predictive of depression, treatment response, or relapse. Translation from research to everyday clinical use may take time as more evidence accumulates.
Final Takeaway
By creating a standardized EEG system, the CAN‑BIND team has laid important groundwork for future biomarker-informed trials in depression. If widely adopted, this could help unlock reliable brain-based measures, supporting earlier diagnosis, personalized treatment, and better long-term monitoring of mental health.
“EEG is gaining recognition for its potential to advance biomarker development in psychiatry with clinical utility that extends beyond depression, thereby highlighting the broader implications of this work. The proposed solutions offer valuable insights and inspiration for establishing standardization approaches in other collaborative neuroimaging efforts and beyond depression.”
Citation: Schwartzmann, B., Dhami, P., Chatterjee, R., Blier, P., Foster, J. A., Hassel, S., Ho, K., Lam, R. W., Milev, R., Müller, D. J., Parikh, S. V., Placenza, F., Quilty, L. C., Rosenblat, J., Soares, C. N., Taylor, V. H., Turecki, G., Rotzinger, S., Kennedy, S. H., … Farzan, F. (2025). Standardized eeg for multi-site biomarker-informed trials: Implementation in the canadian biomarker integration network in depression. Clinical Neurophysiology, 178, 2110932. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clinph.2025.2110932