Gnezditskii, V.V., EEG Inverse Problem and ClinicalElectroencephalography, Taganrog: Taganrog State Radio Engineering Univ., 2000

Electroencephalography has become a less important tool for clinical examination of patients with CNS lesions since the advent of computer tomography (CT), magnetic resonance tomography (MRT), and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imaging of the brain, with or without contrast enhancement. Yet another reason is the large number of diagnostic errors occurring when the brain electrical activity is analyzed. First of all, this is the case when lesions in mediobasal structures that cause focal abnormalities in the EEG are to be revealed, especially when these lesions are paroxysmal. One way to establish the relationship between the brain region generating abnormal activity and the source of focal abnormalities in the EEG recorded from the scalp is to calculate the equivalent dipole sources, which is implemented by solving the EEG inverse problem. It is this problem that is scrutinized in the recent book by V.V. Gnezditskii, Doctor of Biological Sciences, Head of the Laboratory of Clinical Neurophysiology at the Institute of Neurology, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences. Gnezditskii was among the founders of the method for solving the EEG inverse problem. He systematically developed this method theoretically over 25 years, continually translating the results into research and clinical practice for the analysis of human brain biopotentials in health and disease. The book describes a broad range of problems arising in studies of the electrical activity of the human brain, with an emphasis on what the use of the method for locating dipole sources from the scalp-recorded data may yield in tackling those problems. In recent years, this method has increasingly been applied to the analysis of both the electrical and magnetic fields of the brain. A separate chapter in Gnezditskii’s book is devoted to theoretical and methodological issues of the nature of the brain electrical activity and the methods by which it can be studied. Current notions about the origins of normal and pathological electrical activities are given in the context of solving the EEG inverse problem, allowing the reader to better understand the basics of this method and the general rules of its application to locating the brain sources of various patterns of the electrical activity. A historical overview of the development of the dipole source localization (DSL) technique is clearly presented in the form of tables where the main research directions are indicated along with the laboratories where such investigations are underway or were carried out in the past.