SCORE — Standardized Computer-based Organized Reporting of EEG
Overview
SCORE (Standardized Computer-based Organized Reporting of EEG) is a controlled terminology for describing clinical EEG findings, developed to reduce the variability that arises when recordings are reported in free text. It defines predefined terms for the features a clinician scores in an EEG, including background activity, sleep, interictal findings, seizures and their semiology, and neonatal patterns, so that reports can be generated systematically and compared across centres. SCORE matters for open electrophysiology because its terminology is the vocabulary through which clinical EEG events, especially epileptiform and ictal activity, can be annotated in a standardised, machine-readable way, and it has been incorporated into HED to make that annotation available in BIDS-formatted datasets.
Governance and adoption
SCORE originated from consensus workshops of an EEG-expert working group and was first published in 2013, endorsed by the European chapter of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology (IFCN) and by the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE). A revised international second version followed in 2017, endorsed by the IFCN as a reporting guideline, with its terms aligned to the IFCN glossary of EEG terminology and the ILAE classifications of seizures, epilepsies, and status epilepticus. Development has been coordinated by joint IFCN and ILAE taskforces.
The terminology was made machine-readable for research use through the HED-SCORE library schema, which encodes SCORE’s terms as a HED library schema so that clinical EEG events can be annotated in datasets using the same hierarchical vocabulary as other HED annotations. This connects a clinical-neurophysiology reporting standard to the open electrophysiology data ecosystem built around HED and BIDS.
Resources
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1388245717309069 (Beniczky et al. 2017, SCORE second version)
- https://doi.org/10.1111/epi.12135 (Beniczky et al. 2013, SCORE first version)
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-05791-2 (Pacheco et al. 2025, HED-SCORE library schema)