Generalized Wiener estimation of three-dimensional current distribution from biomagnetic measurements

This paper proposes a method for estimating three-dimensional (3-D) biocurrent distribution from spatio-temporal biomagnetic data. This method is based on the principle of generalized Wiener estimation, and it is formulated based on the assumption that current sources are uncorrelated. Computer simulation demonstrates that the proposed method can reconstruct a 3-D current distribution where the conventional least-squares minimum-norm method fails. The influence of noise is also simulated, and the results indicate that a signal-to-noise ratio of more than 20 for the uncorrelated sensor noise is needed to implement the proposed method. The calculated point spread function shows that the proposed method has very high spatial resolution compared to the conventional minimum norm method. The results of computer simulation of the distributed current sources are also presented, including cases where current sources are correlated. These results suggest that no serious errors arise if the source correlation is weak.