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Updated: Oct 12, 2025
Author Spotlight: Advancing Pediatric Epilepsy Surgery in Children Through Novel Biomarkers and Enhanced Localization
Published on: September 20, 2024
Linear distributed inverse solutions for interictal EEG source localisation
Margherita Carboni1, Denis Brunet2, Martin Seeber2
1EEG and Epilepsy Unit, University Hospitals and Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva, Rue Gabrielle-Perret-Gentil 4, 1205 Geneva, Switzerland; Functional Brain Mapping Lab, Department of Basic Neurosciences, University of Geneva, Campus Biotech, 9 Chemin des Mines, 1202 Geneva, Switzerland.
Objective:
To compare the spatial accuracy of 6 linear distributed inverse solutions for EEG source localisation of interictal epileptic discharges: Minimum Norm, Weighted Minimum Norm, Low-Resolution Electromagnetic Tomography (LORETA), Local Autoregressive Average (LAURA), Standardised LORETA, and Exact LORETA.
Methods:
Spatial accuracy was assessed clinically by retrospectively comparing the maximum source of averaged interictal discharges to the resected brain area in 30 patients with successful epilepsy surgery, based on 204-channel EEG. Additionally, localisation errors of the inverse solutions were assessed in computer simulations, with different levels of noise added to the signal in both sensor space and source space.
Results:
In the clinical evaluations, the source maximum was located inside the resected brain area in 50-57% of patients when using LORETA or LAURA, while all other inverse solutions performed significantly worse (17-30%; corrected p < 0.01). In the simulation studies, when noise levels exceeded 10%, LORETA and LAURA had substantially smaller localisation errors than the other inverse solutions.
Conclusions:
LORETA and LAURA provided the highest spatial accuracy both in clinical and simulated data, alongside with a comparably high robustness towards noise.
Significance:
Among the different linear inverse solution algorithms tested, LORETA and LAURA might be preferred for interictal EEG source localisation.
