Magnetoencephalography (MEG)

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) allow functional brain imaging with high temporal resolution. While time-frequency analysis is often used in the field, it is not commonly employed in the context of the ill-posed inverse problem that maps the MEG and EEG measurements to the source space in the brain. In this work, we detail how convex structured sparsity can be exploited to achieve a principled and more accurate functional imaging approach.

Sleep spindles are bursts of rhythmic 10-15 Hz activity, lasting ∼0.5-2 s, that occur during Stage 2 sleep. They are coherent across multiple cortical and thalamic locations in animals, and across scalp EEG sites in humans, suggesting simultaneous generation across the cortical mantle. However, reports of MEG spindles occurring without EEG spindles, and vice versa, are inconsistent with synchronous distributed generation. We objectively determined the frequency of MEG-only, EEG-only, and combined MEG-EEG spindles in high density recordings of natural sleep in humans.

Oscillatory brain rhythms and evoked responses are widely believed to impact cognition, but relatively little is known about how these measures are affected by healthy aging. The present study used MEG to examine age-related changes in spontaneous oscillations and tactile evoked responses in primary somatosensory cortex (SI) in healthy young (YA) and middle-aged (MA) adults.

Cued spatial attention modulates functionally relevant alpha rhythms in visual cortices in humans. Here, we present evidence for analogous phenomena in primary somatosensory neocortex (SI). Using magnetoencephalography, we measured changes in the SI mu rhythm containing mu-alpha (7-14 Hz) and mu-beta (15-29 Hz) components.

Top-down cognitive control has been associated in adults with the prefrontal-parietal network. In children the brain mechanisms of top-down control have rarely been studied. We examined developmental differences in top-down cognitive control by monitoring event-related desynchronization (ERD) and event-related synchronization (ERS) of alpha-band oscillatory activity (8-13 Hz) during anticipation, target detection and post-response stages of a visual working memory task.

An important difference between magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) is that MEG is insensitive to radially oriented sources. We quantified computationally the dependency of MEG and EEG on the source orientation using a forward model with realistic tissue boundaries. Similar to the simpler case of a spherical head model, in which MEG cannot see radial sources at all, for most cortical locations there was a source orientation to which MEG was insensitive.

The objective of this study was to assess the feasibility of magnetoencephalography in epilepsy patients with a vagus nerve stimulator. Magnetoencephalography was performed in two patients with medically intractable epilepsy who had a vagus nerve stimulator. Because of the artifacts caused by the vagus nerve stimulator, no spikes could be identified in the original magnetoencephalographic data in either patient. The temporally extended signal space separation method was used to remove artifacts.

Magnetoencephalography (MEG), in which magnetic fields generated by brain activity are recorded outside of the head, is now in routine clinical practice throughout the world. MEG has become a recognized and vital part of the presurgical evaluation of patients with epilepsy and patients with brain tumors. We review investigations that show an improvement in the postsurgical outcomes of patients with epilepsy by localizing epileptic discharges.

Variations in cortical oscillations in the alpha (7-14 Hz) and beta (15-29 Hz) range have been correlated with attention, working memory, and stimulus detection. The mu rhythm recorded with magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a prominent oscillation generated by Rolandic cortex containing alpha and beta bands. Despite its prominence, the neural mechanisms regulating mu are unknown. We characterized the ongoing MEG mu rhythm from a localized source in the finger representation of primary somatosensory (SI) cortex.

The tendency to perceive faces in random patterns exhibiting configural properties of faces is an example of pareidolia. Perception of 'real' faces has been associated with a cortical response signal arising at approximately 170 ms after stimulus onset, but what happens when nonface objects are perceived as faces? Using magnetoencephalography, we found that objects incidentally perceived as faces evoked an early (165 ms) activation in the ventral fusiform cortex, at a time and location similar to that evoked by faces, whereas common objects did not evoke such activation.