A meshless method for solving the EEG forward problem.

Abstract

We present a numerical method to solve the quasistatic Maxwell equations and compute the electroencephalography (EEG) forward problem solution. More generally, we develop a computationally efficient method to obtain the electric potential distribution generated by a source of electric activity inside a three-dimensional body of arbitrary shape and layers of different electric conductivities. The method needs only a set of nodes on the surface and inside the head, but not a mesh connecting the nodes. This represents an advantage over traditional methods like boundary elements or finite elements since the generation of the mesh is typically computationally intensive. The performance of the proposed method is compared with the boundary element method (BEM) by numerically solving some EEG forward problems examples. For a large number of nodes and the same precision, our method has lower computational load than BEM due to a faster convergence rate and to the sparsity of the linear system to be solved.