MEG Source Imaging and Group Analysis Using VBMEG

Variational Bayesian Multimodal EncephaloGraphy (VBMEG) is a MATLAB toolbox that estimates distributed source currents from magnetoencephalography (MEG)/electroencephalography (EEG) data by integrating functional MRI (fMRI) (https://vbmeg.atr.jp/). VBMEG also estimates whole-brain connectome dynamics using anatomical connectivity derived from a diffusion MRI (dMRI). In this paper, we introduce the VBMEG toolbox and demonstrate its usefulness. By collaborating with VBMEG's tutorial page (https://vbmeg.atr.jp/docs/v2/static/vbmeg2_tutorial_neuromag.html), we show its full pipeline using an open dataset recorded by Wakeman and Henson (2015). We import the MEG data and preprocess them to estimate the source currents. From the estimated source currents, we perform a group analysis and examine the differences of current amplitudes between conditions by controlling the false discovery rate (FDR), which yields results consistent with previous studies. We highlight VBMEG's characteristics by comparing these results with those obtained by other source imaging methods: weighted minimum norm estimate (wMNE), dynamic statistical parametric mapping (dSPM), and linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) beamformer. We also estimate source currents from the EEG data and the whole-brain connectome dynamics from the MEG data and dMRI. The observed results indicate the reliability, characteristics, and usefulness of VBMEG.