Structural Eigenmodes of the Brain to Improve the Source Localization of EEG: Application to Epileptiform Activity

A fundamental view of neuroscience is that, in addition to neuronal activity, the structure of the brain constrains and explains brain function. An alluring formalism in computational neuroscience has been the generation of structural eigenmodes of neural activity from a matrix representing the anatomy of the brain. Traditionally, brain connectomics has been the gold standard for the coupling between structure and function. However, it has recently been suggested that simpler brain geometry can provide more explanatory power in fMRI. An adjacent modality is the source localization problem of EEG, which aims to identify the underlying generators of EEG recordings. The underdetermined nature of the problem requires sufficient constraints to produce realistic and unique solutions of source activity. In this work, a simple framework for incorporating different forms of structural brain eigenmodes to constrain the source localization problem in epilepsy is presented. Geometric eigenmodes were found to be able to reconstruct the spread of a seizure through the brain slightly better than connectome eigenmodes, and both types of structural modes significantly outperformed commonly used approaches.