Current Source Density (CSD) is derived from extracellular electric potential differences recorded from scalp electrodes. The electric potentials recorded from each scalp electrode does not represent the specific activity of local current sources. However, CSD methods can deliver spatially enhanced representation of the direction, location, and intensity of current generators that give rise to the recorded scalp potentials. Inverse methods such as eLORETA use specific algorithms for estimating CSD within a 3-dimensional solution space (3-D brain volume) consisting of thousands of discrete voxel units. The inverse problem comes from physics and mathematics. It is a way of “working backwards” from the data to identify model parameters. In statistics, we usually solve forward problems, which relate model parameters to the data.
« Back to Glossary IndexCurrent Source Density
« Back to Glossary Index