Influence of Modeling Errors in the Boundary Element Analysis of EEG Forward Problems upon the Solution Accuracy

Accurate electroencephalography (EEG) forward calculation is of importance for the accurate estimation of neuronal electrical sources. Conventional studies concerning the EEG forward problems have investigated various factors influencing the forward solution accuracy, e.g. tissue conductivity values in head compartments, anisotropic conductivity distribution of a head model, tessellation patterns of boundary element models, the number of elements used for boundary/finite element method (BEM/FEM), and so on. In the present paper, we investigated the influence of modeling errors in the boundary element volume conductor models upon the accuracy of the EEG forward solutions. From our simulation results, we could confirm that accurate construction of boundary element models is one of the key factors in obtaining accurate EEG forward solutions from BEM. Among three boundaries (scalp, outer skull, and inner skull boundary), the solution errors originated from the modeling error in the scalp boundary were most significant. We found that the nonuniform error distribution on the scalp surface is closely related to the electrode configuration and the error distributions on the outer and inner skull boundaries have statistically meaningful similarity to the curvature distributions of the boundary surfaces. Our simulation results also demonstrated that the accumulation of small modeling errors could lead to considerable errors in the EEG source localization. It is expected that our finding can be a useful reference in generating boundary element head models.