- 作者：Alicia Gonzalez-Moreno ; Sara Aurtenetxe ; Maria-Eugenia Lopez-Garcia ; Francisco del Pozo ; Fern ; o Maestu ; Angel Nevado
- 关键词：Magnetoencefalography (MEG) ; Artifact ; Preprocessing ; Noise-reduction ; Signal-to-noise ratio
- 刊名：Journal of Neuroscience Methods
- 出版年：30 January, 2014
- 年：2014
- 卷：222
- 期：Complete
- 页码：56-61
- 全文大小：1195 K
Background
Magnetoencephalography (MEG) provides a direct measure of brain activity with high combined spatiotemporal resolution. Preprocessing is necessary to reduce contributions from environmental interference and biological noise.New method
The effect on the signal-to-noise ratio of different preprocessing techniques is evaluated. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was defined as the ratio between the mean signal amplitude (evoked field) and the standard error of the mean over trials.
Results
Recordings from 26 subjects obtained during and event-related visual paradigm with an Elekta MEG scanner were employed. Two methods were considered as first-step noise reduction: Signal Space Separation and temporal Signal Space Separation, which decompose the signal into components with origin inside and outside the head. Both algorithm increased the SNR by approximately 100%. Epoch-based methods, aimed at identifying and rejecting epochs containing eye blinks, muscular artifacts and sensor jumps provided an SNR improvement of 5-10%. Decomposition methods evaluated were independent component analysis (ICA) and second-order blind identification (SOBI). The increase in SNR was of about 36% with ICA and 33% with SOBI.
Comparison with existing methods
No previous systematic evaluation of the effect of the typical preprocessing steps in the SNR of the MEG signal has been performed.
Conclusions
The application of either SSS or tSSS is mandatory in Elekta systems. No significant differences were found between the two. While epoch-based methods have been routinely applied the less often considered decomposition methods were clearly superior and therefore their use seems advisable.