MEG source localization using a MLP with a distributed output representation

Abstract—We present a system that takes realistic magnetoencephalographic (MEG) signals and localizes a single dipole to reasonable accuracy in real time. At its heart is a multilayer perceptron (MLP) which takes the sensor measurements as inputs, uses one hidden layer, and generates as outputs the amplitudes of receptive fields holding a distributed representation of the dipole location. We trained this Soft-MLP on dipolar sources with real brain noise and converted the network’s output into an explicit Cartesian coordinate representation of the dipole location using two different decoding strategies. The proposed Soft-MLPs are much more accurate than previous networks which output source locations in Cartesian coordinates. Hybrid Soft-MLP-start-LM systems, in which the Soft-MLP output initializes Levenberg–Marquardt, retained their accuracy of 0.28 cm with a decrease in computation time from 36 ms to 30 ms. We apply the Soft-MLP localizer to real MEG data separated by a blind source separation algorithm, and compare the Soft-MLP dipole locations to those of a conventional system. Index Terms—Distributed representation, magnetoencephalography, multilayer perceptron, source localization