Determination of activation areas in the human auditory cortex by means of synthetic aperture magnetometry

In this study we applied synthetic aperture magnetometry (SAM) to investigate active cortical areas associated with magnetically recorded transient and steady-state auditory evoked responses. For transient evoked responses, SAM images reveal an activated volume of cortical tissue within the lateral aspect of the superior temporal plane. The volume of cortical activation for steady-state responses was located more medially than that for transient evoked responses. Additionally, SAM also reveals a small overlap of activated areas between transient and steady-state evoked responses, which has not be demonstrated when using equivalent current dipole (ECD) source modeling. Source waveforms from SAM and ECD analyses show comparable temporal information. Results from this study suggest that SAM is a useful technique for imaging cortical structures involved in processing perceptual information. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.