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    Neuroimage. 2004 May;22(1):323-32.

    Geometrical interpretation of fMRI-guided MEG/EEG inverse estimates.

    Ahlfors SP, Simpson GV.

    MGH/MIT/HMS Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 149 13th Street, Mailcode 149-2301, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA. seppo@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu

    Magneto- and electroencephalography (MEG/EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) provide complementary information about the functional organization of the human brain. An important advantage of MEG/EEG is the millisecond time resolution in detecting electrical activity in the cerebral cortex. The interpretation of MEG/EEG signals, however, is limited by the difficulty of determining the spatial distribution of the neural activity. Functional MRI can help in the MEG/EEG source analysis by suggesting likely locations of activity. We present a geometric interpretation of fMRI-guided inverse solutions in which the MEG/EEG source estimate minimizes a distance to a subspace defined by the fMRI data. In this subspace regularization (SSR) approach, the fMRI bias does not assume preferred amplitudes for MEG/EEG sources, only locations. Characteristic dependence of the source estimates on the regularization parameters is illustrated with simulations. When the fMRI locations match the true MEG/EEG source locations, they serve to bias the underdetermined MEG/EEG inverse solution toward the fMRI loci. Importantly, when the fMRI loci do not match the true MEG/EEG loci, the solution is insensitive to those fMRI loci.

    PMID: 15110022 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

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