MEG current source reconstruction using a meta-analysis fMRI prior

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) offers a unique way to noninvasively investigate millisecond-order cortical activities by mapping sensor signals (magnetic fields outside the head) to cortical current sources using current source reconstruction methods. Current source reconstruction is defined as an ill-posed inverse problem, since the number of sensors is less than the number of current sources. One powerful approach to solving this problem is to use functional MRI (fMRI) data as a spatial constraint, although it boosts the cost of measurement and the burden on subjects. Here, we show how to use the meta-analysis fMRI data synthesized from thousands of papers instead of the individually recorded fMRI data. To mitigate the differences between the meta-analysis and individual data, the former are imported as prior information of the hierarchical Bayesian estimation. Using realistic simulations, we found out the performance of current source reconstruction using meta-analysis fMRI data to be better than that using low-quality individual fMRI data and conventional methods. By applying experimental data of a face recognition task, we qualitatively confirmed that group analysis results using the meta-analysis fMRI data showed a tendency similar to the results using the individual fMRI data. Our results indicate that the use of meta-analysis fMRI data improves current source reconstruction without additional measurement costs. We assume the proposed method would have greater effect for modalities with lower measurement costs, such as optically pumped magnetometers.