Date of Award

2010-01-01

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Biological Sciences

Advisor(s)

Louis N. Irwin

Abstract

Slow Cortical Potentials (SCPs) and Evoked Potentials (EP) in combination with source reconstruction techniques can provide accurate and essential information about brain activity. Current techniques offer the necessary tools to study the human brain by providing detailed temporal and spatial information of the normal brain and its disorders. Human functional neuroimaging currently uses fMRI as the gold standard because of its high spatial localization and because of being non-invasive. This method's disadvantages are its high cost and unnatural environment. The purpose of this work was to determine if the combination of SCPs and traditional electroencephalography (EEG) provides a suitable technique to study the temporal and spatial localization of brain activity. I propose the application of EEG, SCPs, and source reconstruction as an alternative to fMRI brain mapping. This study provides supporting evidence for the application of EEG and SCPs not only as an alternative but also as a complementary technique which can provide the temporal details missing from fMRI data. During this work, localization equivalent to that obtained from fMRI was achieved by combining EEG and source localization. I provide ample evidence that a high level of spatial detail can be achieved by combining high density EEG recordings, and slow cortical potentials with accurate source reconstruction techniques.

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

110 pages

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Hugo Sandoval

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