Improved separability of dipole sources by tripolar versus conventional disk electrodes: A modeling study using independent component analysis

Tripolar electrodes have been shown to have less mutual information and higher spatial resolution than disc electrodes. In this work, a four-layer anisotropic concentric spherical head computer model was programmed, then four configurations of time-varying dipole signals were used to generate the scalp surface signals that would be obtained with tripolar and disc electrodes. Finally, a fast fixed-point algorithm was used for signal independent component analysis (ICA). The results show that signals from tripolar electrodes generated better ICA separation results than from disc electrodes.