Bayesian mixture models for source separation in MEG

Abstract

This paper discusses the problem of imaging electromagnetic brain activity from measurements of the induced magnetic field outside the head. This imaging modality, magnetoencephalography (MEG), is known to be severely ill posed, and in order to obtain useful estimates for the activity map, complementary information needs to be used to regularize the problem. In this paper, a particular emphasis is on finding non-superficial focal sources that induce a magnetic field that may be confused with noise due to external sources and with distributed brain noise. The data are assumed to come from a mixture of a focal source and a spatially distributed possibly virtual source; hence, to differentiate between those two components, the problem is solved within a Bayesian framework, with a mixture model prior encoding the information that different sources may be concurrently active. The mixture model prior combines one density that favors strongly focal sources and another that favors spatially distributed sources, interpreted as clutter in the source estimation. Furthermore, to address the challenge of localizing deep focal sources, a novel depth sounding algorithm is suggested, and it is shown with simulated data that the method is able to distinguish between a signal arising from a deep focal source and a clutter signal.