A simulation and experimental study of 3D scalp spline Laplacian mapping

A simulation and experimental study has been conducted on 3D scalp spline Laplacian mapping from EEG. Using the three-sphere inhomogeneous head model, the performance of the 3D scalp spline Laplacian algorithm was rigorously evaluated for a variety of brain source configurations under different noise levels. The present simulation results demonstrate the excellent performance of the 3D spline Laplacian algorithm in mapping and imaging the underlying cortical sources with much enhanced spatial resolution, as compared to the scalp potentials. Human experiments were further conducted to test the feasibility of scalp Laplacian mapping. Pattern reversal visual evoked potentials were recorded from 96 electrodes and the cortical sources at P100 were estimated. The VEP experiments demonstrate promising results that the present 3D spline Laplacian mapping can eliminate the misleading far field in the scalp potential map, and localize and map the underlying cortical sources induced by the visual stimuli.