Development of Volume Conductor and Source Models to Localize Epileptic Foci

Summary: There is increasing interest in mapping and source reconstruction from electrocorticoencephalographic (ECoG) grid data and comparison to surface EEG evaluations of epileptic patients. ECoG mapping onto three-dimensional renderings of the individual cortical anatomy derived from magnetic resonance images and computed tomography (CT) is performed after coregistration of anatomical and functional coordinate systems. Source reconstructions from ECoG and EEG are compared using different source models and realistically shaped volume conductor models. Realistically shaped volume conductor models for EEG source reconstruction are a prerequisite for improved localization accuracy. Individual boundary element method (BEM) models derived from MRI represent the “gold standard” and can approximate isotropic homogeneous head compartments and thus give an improved description of the head shape as compared with classical oversimplifying spherical shell models. Anisotropic volume conduction properties of the bone layer or the white matter fibers can be described by the finite element method (FEM); unfortunately, these models require a huge computational effort and are thus not used in daily applications. To avoid this computational effort, head models derived from an averaged MRI dataset can be used. Highly refined models with a large number of nodes and thus better numerical accuracy can be used by this approach, because the setup is performed only once and the decomposed models or precomputed leadfield matrices are saved for later application. Individual image data are not at all needed, if an overlay of the reconstruction results with the anatomy is not desired. With precomputed leadfield matrices and linear interpolation techniques, at least standardized BEM and FEM volume conductor models derived from averaged MRI datasets can achieve the same computational speed as analytical spherical models. The smoothed cortical envelope is used as a realistically shaped single-shell volume conductor model for ECoG source reconstruction, whereas three-compartment BEM-models are required for EEG. The authors describe how to localize ECoG-grid electrode positions and how to segment the cortical surface from coregistered magnetic resonance and CT images. Landmark-based coregistration is performed using common fiducials in both image modalities. Another more promising automatic approach is based on mutual three-dimensional volume gray-level information. The ECoG electrode positions can be retrieved from three-dimensional CT slices manually using cursors in thresholded images with depth information. Alternatively, the smoothed envelope of the cortical surface segmented from the MRI is used to semiautomatically determine the grid electrode positions by marking the four corners and measuring distances along the smoothed surface. With extended source patches for cortically constrained scans and current density reconstructions, results from ECoG and surface EEG data were compared. Single equivalent dipoles were used to explain the EEG far fields, and results were compared with the original current density distributions explaining the ECoG data. The authors studied the performance of spherical and realistically shaped BEM volume conductor models for EEG and ECoG source reconstruction in spherical and nonspherical parts of the head with simulations and measured epileptic spike data. Only small differences between spherical and realistically shaped models were found in the spherical parts of the head, whereas realistically shaped models are superior to spherical approximations in both single-shell ECoG and three-shell EEG cases in the nonspherical parts, such as the temporal lobe areas. The ECoG near field is more complicated to interpret than the surface EEG far field and cannot be explained in general by simple equivalent dipoles. However, from simulations with realistically shaped volume conductor models and cortically constrained source models, the authors studied how the bone and skin layer act as spatial low pass filters that smooth and simplify the surface EEG maps generated by much more complicated-looking source configurations derived from measured ECoG data.