Evaluations of sparse source imaging and minimum norm estimate methods in both simulation and clinical MEG data

The aim of the present study is to evaluate the capability of a recently proposed l¹-norm based regularization method, named as variation-based sparse cortical current density (VB-SCCD) algorithm, in estimating location and spatial coverage of extensive brain sources. Its performance was compared to the conventional minimum norm estimate (MNE) using both simulations and clinical interictal spike MEG data from epilepsy patients. Four metrics were adopted to evaluate two regularization methods for EEG/MEG inverse problems from different aspects in simulation study. Both methods were further compared in reconstructing epileptic sources and validated using results from clinical diagnosis. Both simulation and experimental results suggest VB-SCCD has better performance in localization and estimation of source extents, as well as less spurious sources than MNE, which makes it a promising noninvasive tool to assist presurgical evaluation for surgical treatment in epilepsy patients.