Abstract

Dynamic estimation methods based on linear state-space models have been applied to the inverse problem of magnetoencephalography (MEG), and can improve source localization compared with static methods by incorporating temporal continuity as a constraint. The efficacy of these methods is influenced by how well the state-space model approximates the dynamics of the underlying brain current sources. While some components of the state-space model can be inferred from brain anatomy and knowledge of the MEG instrument noise structure, parameters governing the temporal evolution of underlying current sources are unknown and must be selected on an ad-hoc basis or estimated from data. In this work, we apply the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm to estimate parameters and sources in an MEG state-space model, and demonstrate in simulation studies that the resulting source estimates are superior to those provided by static methods or dynamic methods employing ad hoc parameter selection.