Anatomical harmonics basis based brain source localization with application to epilepsy

Abstract Brain Source Localization (BSL) using Electroencephalogram (EEG) has been a useful noninvasive modality for the diagnosis of epileptogenic zones, study of evoked related potentials, and brain disorders. The inverse solution of BSL is limited by high computational cost and localization error. The performance is additionally limited by head shape assumption and the corresponding harmonics basis function. In this work, an anatomical harmonics basis (Spherical Harmonics (SH), and more particularly Head Harmonics (H2)) based BSL is presented. The spatio-temporal four shell head model is formulated in SH and H2 domain. The anatomical harmonics domain formulation leads to dimensionality reduction and increased contribution of source eigenvalues, resulting in decreased computation and increased accuracy respectively. The performance of spatial subspace based Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) and Recursively Applied and Projected (RAP)-MUSIC method is compared with the proposed SH and H2 counterparts on simulated data. SH and H2 domain processing effectively resolves the problem of high computational cost without sacrificing the inverse source localization accuracy. The proposed H2 MUSIC was additionally validated for epileptogenic zone localization on clinical EEG data. The proposed framework offers an effective solution to clinicians in automated and time efficient seizure localization.