Robust Characterization of Hippocampus Dynamics from Magnetoencephalography

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Sarang Dalal, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: from 2012 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 222150428

This project aims to improve the detection of hippocampus activity using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG), both separately and simultaneously, in order to enable the noninvasive investigation of the functional role of the human hippocampus in oscillatory cognitive networks. As the direct visibility of hippocampus activity to MEG is not universally accepted, invasive recordings in epileptics will serve as a validation measure. Hippocampus shall be stimulated using spatial navigation and episodic memory tasks. Additionally, cortical-hippocampus connectivity will be studied using a combination of the two modalities. As the hippocampus is a deep source, its detection is heavily critical on the accuracy of not only the inverse model, but the quality of the forward model and minimization of coregistration errors. Therefore, finite element models that account for the morphology and conductivity of brain tissues shall be employed, and existing photogrammetry methods deployed to ensure coregistration of utmost accuracy. Physiological noise sources such as ECG shall be recorded to estimate their scalp distribution, and then explicitly included in the source model with appropriate coordinates relative to the head. Algorithms such as beamforming excel in separating such signals.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Participating Persons: Privatdozent Dr. Stefan Rampp; Professor Dr. Carsten Hermann Wolters