Effect of electrode density and measurement noise on the spatial resolution of cortical potential distribution

The purpose of the present study was to examine the spatial resolution of electroencephalography (EEG) by means of inverse cortical EEG solution. The main interest was to study how the number of measurement electrodes and the amount of measurement noise affects the spatial resolution. A three-layer spherical head model was used to obtain the source-field relationship of cortical potentials and scalp EEG field. Singular value decomposition was used to evaluate the spatial resolution with various measurement noise estimates. The results suggest that as the measurement noise increases the advantage of dense electrode systems is decreased. With low realistic measurement noise, a more accurate inverse cortical potential distribution can be obtained with an electrode system where the distance between two electrodes is as small as 16 mm, corresponding to as many as 256 measurement electrodes. In clinical measurement environments, it is always beneficial to have at least 64 measurement electrodes.