A FDM anisotropic formulation for EEG simulation

Accurate head modeling is required to properly simulate bioelectric phenomena in 3-D as well as to estimate the 3-D bioelectric activity starting from superficial bioelectric measurements and 3-D imaging. Aiming to build an accurate and realistic representation of the volume conductor of the head, also the anisotropy of head tissues should be taken into account. In this paper we describe a new finite-difference method (FDM) formulation which accounts for anisotropy of the various head tissues. Our proposal, being based on FDM, derives the head model directly from patient's specific clinical images. We present here the details of the numerical formulation and the method validation by comparing our numerical proposal and known analytical results using a multi-shell anisotropic head model with skull anisotropy. Furthermore, we analyzed also different numerical grid refinement and EEG source characteristics. The comparison with previously developed FDM methods shows a good performance of the proposed method.