Setting location priors using beamforming improves model comparison in MEG-DCM

Abstract

Modelling neuronal interactions using a directed network can be used to provide insight into the activity of the brain during experimental tasks. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) allows for the observation of the fast neuronal dynamics necessary to characterize the activity of sources and their interactions. A network representation of these sources and their connections can be formed by mapping them to nodes and their connection strengths to edge weights. Dynamic Causal Modelling (DCM) presents a Bayesian framework to estimate the parameters of these networks, as well as the ability to test hypotheses on the structure of the network itself using Bayesian model comparison. DCM uses a neurologically-informed representation of the active neural sources, which leads to an underdetermined system and increased complexity in estimating the network parameters. This work shows that inform- ing the MEG DCM source location with prior distributions defined using a MEG source localization algorithm improves model selection accuracy. DCM inversion of a group of candidate models shows an enhanced ability to identify a ground-truth network structure when source-localized prior means are used.