Functional neuroimaging of dynamic brain activity

Brain electrical activity is distributed in the three physical dimensions and evolves in time. Significant efforts have been made to attempt to image the dynamic brain activation from noninvasive electrical measurements made over the scalp, due to the high temporal resolution. In the past two decades, much progress has been made in solving the electrophysiological neuroimaging problem and EEG based neuroimaging has been increasingly used in neuroscience research and clinical applications. It has been demonstrated that, by analyzing electrophysiological data in the time, frequency, space domains, we can derive rich information about spatio-temporal distributions of brain activation which reveals important information about brain functions. Clinical studies in patients with partial seizure demonstrate the ability of electrophysiological neuroimaging in localizing and imaging epileptogenic foci from noninvasive measurements, aiding surgical planning. Recent efforts on multimodal neuroimaging have further demonstrated the merits of multimodal imaging, providing enhanced spatio-temporal resolution in imaging brain activity. This presentation will review the principles and important recent developments in this exciting field.