LINEAR-ESTIMATION THEORY APPLIED TO THE RECONSTRUCTION OF A 3-D VECTOR CURRENT DISTRIBUTION

Linear estimation theory incorporating statisticala prioriknowledge is applied to the inverse problem of reconstructing a static 3-D vector source field from another 3-D vector measurement field. The motivationfor this development is to reconstruct 3-D electric current distributions from a set of magnetic measurements.Such a capability would be useful for the clinical determination of neural currents, for example. A simulationis presented to demonstrate the reconstruction of a class of simple nonbiological source objects, and to showthe dependence of these reconstructions on the data taking configuration and the statisticala prioriknowledge that is incorporated into the reconstruction process. © 1990 Optical Society of America.