title: Estimating brain conductivities and dipole source signals with EEG arrays.
abstract: Techniques based on electroencephalography (EEG) measure the electric potentials on the scalp and process them to infer the location, distribution, and intensity of underlying neural activity. Accuracy in estimating these parameters is highly sensitive to uncertainty in the conductivities of the head tissues. Furthermore, dissimilarities among individuals are ignored when standarized values are used. In this paper, we apply the maximum-likelihood and maximum a posteriori (MAP) techniques to simultaneously estimate the layer conductivity ratios and source signal using EEG data. We use the classical 4-sphere model to approximate the head geometry, and assume a known dipole source position. The accuracy of our estimates is evaluated by comparing their standard deviations with the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB). The applicability of these techniques is illustrated with numerical examples on simulated EEG data. Our results show that the estimates have low bias and attain the CRB for sufficiently large number of experiments. We also present numerical examples evaluating the sensitivity to imprecise assumptions on the source position and skull thickness. Finally, we propose extensions to the case of unknown source position and present examples for real data.
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioengineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607-7053, USA. dgutie7@uic.edu
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Gutiérrez
authors.forename: Arye
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Nehorai
authors.forename: Carlos H
authors.initials: CH
authors.lastname: Muravchik
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping / Q000379:methods*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003936:Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D004553:Electric Conductivity; D004569:Electroencephalography / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D008959:Models, Neurological; D015233:Models, Statistical; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity