Hi Melinda Peters ,

This may depend on what you will be studying, how big would be your group/sample size, region of the brain and possible clinical phase or interventions, your location, etc.

There are labs that may perform EEG for you especially if your groups are small.

A good way is to search for papers similar to what your pilot study would be and contact the corresponding authors for help.

For instance:

Article Low Cost Electrode Assembly for EEG Recordings in Mice

Thank you Bahman Sadeghi . I think N=6 is adequate. I have found that Charles River and DSI both can run my experiment from beginning to end for a bit more than it costs to buy all new equipment. Since this is preliminary work, it may be worth the cost to outsource all of it.

Agreed, Melinda Peters . Good luck with it!

Regarding that you said you do not have the space and need to buy EEG modules for a pilot study, it would be worthy though your group is not that large to cost much.

It is also fine when you consider that almost in every pilot study you need sufficient time to set up your new equipment and try new methods, kind of a trial and error like experimentation; sometimes with a lot of problems, time-consuming efforts and often times facing funding complications in the midst if it gets longer that what you thought. You may need to go to other labs to acquire more hands on experience too which needs more time but leads you to have more skills though. But those who do it routinely can run that part of the experiment or help you conduct it without all of those problems.

What is now important is your experimental design in terms of group plot and having good case and controls with adequate number of rats in each for your statistical analysis to be reliable in future.