Denoising, separation and localization of EEG sources in the context of epilepsy

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a routinely used technique for the diagnosis and management of epilepsy. In this context, the objective of this thesis consists in providing algorithms for the extraction, separation, and localization of epileptic sources from the EEG recordings. In the first part of the thesis, we consider two preprocessing steps applied to raw EEG data. The first step aims at removing muscle artifacts by means of Independent Component Analysis (ICA). In this context, we propose a new semi-algebraic deflation algorithm that extracts the epileptic sources more efficiently than conventional methods as we demonstrate on simulated and real EEG data. The second step consists in separating correlated sources that can be involved in the propagation of epileptic phenomena. To this end, we explore deterministic tensor decomposition methods exploiting space-time-frequency or space-time-wave-vector data. We compare the two preprocessing methods using computer simulations to determine in which cases ICA, tensor decomposition, or a combination of both should be used. The second part of the thesis is devoted to distributed source localization techniques. After providing a survey and a classification of current state-of-the-art methods, we present an algorithm for distributed source localization that builds on the results of the tensor-based preprocessing methods. The algorithm is evaluated on simulated and real EEG data. Furthermore, we propose several improvements of a source imaging method based on structured sparsity. Finally, a comprehensive performance study of various brain source imaging methods is conducted on physiologically plausible, simulated EEG data.