Dipolar estimates of the cortical map

Various methods based on anatomical or mathematical models have been developed to estimate cortical potentials. Among them, the most popular are the surface Laplacians (SL) and the Electrical Source Imaging (ESI) approaches. In this paper, we develop an informed method named dipolar cortical mapping (DCM), aiming to find a balance between ESI methods based on anatomical models and methods without strong anatomical priors, such as surface Laplacians. Our method only uses easily available information on the electrode position and is based on a physiologically parametrized family of interpolating functions. Simulation results show that DCM competes with previously proposed surface Laplacians and with the model based Minimum Norm Estimates (MNE) computed with a Boundary Element Model (BEM).