Section: Application Domains

Inverse source problems in EEG

Participants : Paul Asensio, Laurent Baratchart, Juliette Leblond, Jean-Paul Marmorat, Masimba Nemaire.

Solving overdetermined Cauchy problems for the Laplace equation on a spherical layer (in 3-D) in order to extrapolate incomplete data (see Section 3.2.1) is a necessary ingredient of the team's approach to inverse source problems, in particular for applications to EEG, see [9]. Indeed, the latter involves propagating the initial conditions through several layers of different conductivities, from the boundary shell down to the center of the domain where the singularities (i.e. the sources) lie. Once propagated to the innermost sphere, it turns out that traces of the boundary data on 2-D cross sections coincide with analytic functions with branched singularities in the slicing plane [8],  [42]. The singularities are related to the actual location of the sources, namely their moduli reach in turn a maximum when the plane contains one of the sources. Hence we are back to the 2-D framework of Section 3.3.3, and recovering these singularities can be performed via best rational approximation. The goal is to produce a fast and sufficiently accurate initial guess on the number and location of the sources in order to run heavier descent algorithms on the direct problem, which are more precise but computationally costly and often fail to converge if not properly initialized. Our belief is that such a localization process can add a geometric, valuable piece of information to the standard temporal analysis of EEG signal records.

Numerical experiments obtained with our software FindSources3D give very good results on simulated data and we are now engaged in the process of handling real experimental data, simultaneously recorded by EEG and MEG devices, in collaboration with our partners at INS, hospital la Timone, Marseille (see Section 6.1.3).

Furthermore, another approach is being studied for EEG, that consists in regularizing the inverse source problem by a total variation constraint on the source term (a measure), added to the quadratic data approximation criterion. It is similar to the path that is taken for inverse magnetization problems (see Sections 4.2 and 6.1.1), and it presently focuses on surface-distributed models.