High-resolution EEG source imaging of one-year-old children

Recently we described an iterative skull conductivity and source location estimation (SCALE) algorithm for simultaneously estimating head tissue conductivities and brain source locations. SCALE uses a realistic FEM forward problem head model and scalp maps of 10 or more near-dipolar sources identified by independent component analysis (ICA) decomposition of sufficient high-density EEG data. In this study, we applied SCALE to 20 minutes of 64-channel EEG data and magnetic resonance (MR) head images from four twelve-months-of-age infants. For each child, we selected 15-16 near-dipolar independent components from multiple-model adaptive mixture ICA (AMICA) decomposition of their EEG data. SCALE converged to brain-to-skull conductivity ratio (BSCR) estimates in the 10-12 range and mostly compact gyral or sulcal cortical distributions for the IC sources.