Summary
Objectives:
The objective of this study was to explore suitable spatial filters for inverse estimation
of cortical potentials from the scalp electroencephalogram. The effect of incorporating
noise covariance into inverse procedures was examined by computer simulations and
tested in human experiment.
Methods:
The parametric projection filter, which allows inverse estimation with the presence
of information on the noise, was applied to an inhomogeneous three-concentric-sphere
model under various noise conditions in order to estimate the cortical potentials
from the scalp potentials. The method for determining the optimum regularization parameter,
which can be applied for parametric inverse techniques, is also discussed.
Results:
Human visual evoked potential experiment was carried out to examine the performance
of the proposed restoration method. The parametric projection filter gave more localized
inverse solution of cortical potential distribution than the truncated SVD and Tikhonov
regularization.
Conclusion:
The present simulation results suggest that incorporation of information on the noise
covariance allows better estimation of cortical potentials, than inverse solutions
without knowledge about the noise covariance, when the correlation between the signal
and noise is low.
Keywords
High resolution EEG - cortical potential imaging - inverse problem - parametric projection
filter - noise covariance