Localization bias and spatial resolution of adaptive and non-adaptive spatial filters for MEG source reconstruction

This paper discusses the location bias and the spatial resolution in the reconstruction of a single dipole source by various spatial filtering techniques used for neuromagnetic imaging. We first analyze the location bias for several representative adaptive and non-adaptive spatial filters using their resolution kernels. This analysis theoretically validates previously reported empirical findings that standardized low-resolution electromagnetic tomography (sLORETA) has no location bias. We also find that the minimum-variance spatial filter does exhibit bias in the reconstructed location of a single source, but that this bias is eliminated by using the normalized lead field. We then focus on the comparison of sLORETA and the lead-field normalized minimum-variance spatial filter, and analyze the effect of noise on source location bias. We find that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the measurements determines whether the sLORETA reconstruction has source location bias, while the lead-field normalized minimum-variance spatial filter has no location bias even in the presence of noise. Finally, we compare the spatial resolution for sLORETA and the minimum-variance filter, and show that the minimum-variance filter attains much higher resolution than sLORETA does. The results of these analyses are validated by numerical experiments as well as by reconstructions based on two sets of evoked magnetic responses.