Spatio-temporal EEG source localization using simulated annealing

The estimation of multiple dipole parameters in spatio-temporal source modeling (STSM) of electroencephalographic (EEG) data is a difficult nonlinear optimization problem due to multiple local minima in the cost function. A straightforward iterative optimization approach to such a problem is very susceptible to being trapped in a local minimum, thereby resulting in incorrect estimates of the dipole parameters. Here, the authors present and evaluate a more robust optimization approach based on the simulated annealing algorithm. The complexity of this approach for the STSM problem was reduced by separating the dipole parameters into linear (moment) and nonlinear (location) components. The effectiveness of the proposed method and its superiority over the traditional nonlinear simplex technique in escaping local minima were tested and demonstrated through computer simulations. The annealing algorithm and its implementation for multidipole estimation are also discussed. The authors found the simulated annealing approach to be 7-31% more effective than the simplex method at converging to the true global minimum for a number of different kinds of three-dipole problems simulated in this work. In addition, the computational cost of the proposed approach was only marginally higher than its simplex counterpart. The annealing method also yielded similar solutions irrespective of the initial guesses used. The proposed simulated annealing method is an attractive alternative to the simplex method that is currently more common in dipole estimation applications.