Time-coherent expansion of MEG/EEG cortical sources

In this study we estimated the spatial extent of cortical areas of time-coherent activity using the inverse problem in magneto/electroencephalography (MEEG). The model discussed here uses classical regularization tools in order to force the inverse solution to be piece-wise coherent. First, the cortex was seeded by focal dipolar sources. Then, a time-coherent expansion (TCE) onto the cortical surface was performed in order to obtain surface source models composed of patches with uniform current density. Patches represent extended cortical regions with one single time course per active area. Results obtained from synthetic data show that using the TCE method is relevant even with a low signal-to-noise ratio, although the final estimation is often slightly biased. We applied the TCE method to evoked magnetic fields obtained after electrical stimulation of fingers in order to estimate the somatotopic cortical maps of the primary somatosensory cortex. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).