'The stone of madness' and the search for the cortical sources of brain diseases with non-invasive EEG techniques

Abstract

In the masterpiece ‘The extraction of the stone of madness’ due to the famous Dutch painter Hieronymous Bosch (1450–1516) (see Fig. 1), a foolish man turns to a charlatan surgeon for his own release from illness. This theme is inspired by folk satire and by the hostility against the physicians’ guild at that time. In fact, in that age head surgery for the extraction of ‘stones’ from the brain in psychiatric disorders was relatively widespread. Five hundred years later, the invasive approach to the knowledge of brain diseases has providentially changed thanks to modern brain imaging techniques, such as—for instance— the computerized tomographic scan (CT), the electroencephalography (EEG), the magnetoencephalography (MEG) or the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Only the last 3 techniques supply fruitful information on the brain function and can be integrated with CT or MRI methods able to offer a detailed topography of brain structures. In the following paragraphs, we will briefly recall some technical advances of these last 10 years in the improvement of our capability to extract ‘information’ about the brain activity in a non-invasive way. Then, we will comment on the article by Zhang et al. (2003) where a cortical imaging technique is used to estimate potential distributions over a simple model of dura mater in 5 epileptic pediatric patients before surgery. 2. The problems of conventional EEG recordings