COMBINING EEG, MEG, FMRI

Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton FL

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Linked publications & trials

Abstract

The aim of this project is to provide a new approach to combining the different non-invasive brain imaging technologies, i.e. electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and functional MRI (fMRI) in order to overcome the poor spatial resolution of the electrophysiological techniques and the low temporal resolution of fMRI thus providing a more complete view of spatiotemporal brain dynamics. The approach takes advantage of the capabilities of MRI to locate the 3-d regions inside the brain that are activated during a task. Key features include focusing on regions of interest identified from fMRI scans and calculating forward solutions instead of solving an inverse problem. Knowledge of the folding or local shape of the cortex surface at these activation sites allows for a set of weight coefficients for sensors to be found to increase the sensitivity of the magnetometer or set of electrodes for these particular regions, i.e. to focus on the activity regions. The outcome will enable us to observe the time course of local activities with the temporal resolution of EEG or MEG (milliseconds). The dataset to be used in this project will consist of 143- channel MEG, 120-electrode EEG, high-resolution MRI and fMRI to be recorded in 1999 with all technologies from the same subjects during auditory-motor coordination and auditory perception tasks. This database will be made available on our web site and can be used by other researchers to test and improve analysis and visualization algorithms.