Reduction of the impact of multiple uncertain conductivity values on EEG dipole source analysis

Abstract

It is well known that the uncertain knowledge of the conductivity values of the head tissues has an important impact upon the accuracy of the electroencephalogram source reconstruction. Assuming a certain value of the conductivity often leads to high reconstruction error values when solving the inverse problem. It is possible to quantify the impact of multiple uncertain conductivity values on the localization accuracy. We propose an approach that reduces the impact of these multiple uncertainties on the reconstruction accuracy of the dipole parameters. This paper elaborates the numerical method and shows results of localization accuracy in a five-shell spherical head model. Sensitivity analysis, when considering multiple layers in the head model, shows the different scales of the influence of the various uncertain conductivity values on the potential values. We propose a cost function that reduces the impact of multiple uncertainties of the conductivity value on the electroencephalogram dipole reconstruction and two strategies for selecting potential values on the basis of the sensitivity analysis. Numerical simulations, when considering multiple uncertainties in the model, provide results with higher reconstruction accuracy compared with the case where only a single uncertainty is taken into account.