Reconstruction of extended current sources in a human body phantom applying biomagnetic measuring techniques

We have prepared a human body phantom for experimental verification of inverse solution techniques which are applied to magnetic (and electric) measuring data. Physical models of extended primary current sources were used to generate these fields. Magnetic field maps closed to the phantom surface were recorded by means of multi-channel biomagnetic measuring systems. Different deterministic optimization techniques were applied to both measured and simulated data to reconstruct the impressed current density distribution. We have found that all common used minimum norm methods (L/sub p/-norms, 1/spl les/p/spl les/2) cannot reconstruct the extension of current source distributions satisfactorily. The physical phantom was found to be a suitable tool for validation of source reconstruction techniques.