MV-PURE estimator of dipole source signals in EEG

We consider the problem of dipole source signals estimation in electroencephalography (EEG) using beamforming techniques in ill-conditioned settings. We take advantage of the link between the linearly constrained minimum-variance (LCMV) beamformer in sensor array processing and the best linear unbiased estimator (BLUE) in linear regression modeling. We show that the recently introduced reduced-rank extension of BLUE, named minimum-variance pseudo-unbiased reduced-rank estimator (MV-PURE), achieves much lower estimation error not only than LCMV beamformer, but also than the previously derived reduced-rank principal components (PC) and cross-spectral metrics (CSM) beamformers in ill-conditioned settings. The practical scenarios where the considered estimation model becomes ill-conditioned are discussed, then we show the applicability of MV-PURE dipole source estimator under those conditions through realistic simulations.