Functional brain mapping with high-temporal resolution: introducing "evolutionary activation cells"

Functional image sequences obtained from image reconstruction techniques applied to magneto and electroencephalography data convey a large amount of information in the space and time domains. Conventional approaches to their analysis necessitate considerable input from neuroscience experts to extract pertinent information. We introduce in this paper an automatic data sequencing procedure of these brain activation maps. Our main objective consists in facilitating and accelerating the extraction of spatiotemporal activation patterns of interest called activation cells. These cells are tracked across time with a consistent labeling strategy that follows a small set of predefined evolutionary scenarios. Resulting graphical synopsis are exemplified on the analysis of epileptic spike events and indicate satisfactory consistency with human expertise.