Anatomically constrained dipole adjustment (ANACONDA) for accurate MEG/EEG focal source localizations

This paper proposes an alternative approach to enhance localization accuracy of MEG and EEG focal sources. The proposed approach assumes anatomically constrained spatio-temporal dipoles, initial positions of which are estimated from local peak positions of distributed sources obtained from a pre-execution of distributed source reconstruction. The positions of the dipoles are then adjusted on the cortical surface using a novel updating scheme named cortical surface scanning. The proposed approach has many advantages over the conventional ones: (1) as the cortical surface scanning algorithm uses spatio-temporal dipoles, it is robust with respect to noise; (2) it requires no a priori information on the numbers and initial locations of the activations; (3) as the locations of dipoles are restricted only on a tessellated cortical surface, it is physiologically more plausible than the conventional ECD model. To verify the proposed approach, it was applied to several realistic MEG/EEG simulations and practical experiments. From the several case studies, it is concluded that the anatomically constrained dipole adjustment (ANACONDA) approach will be a very promising technique to enhance accuracy of focal source localization which is essential in many clinical and neurological applications of MEG and EEG.