Electrical Circuit Modeling for Somatosensory Evoked Fields in Magnetoencephalogram

Abstract

We measured somatosensory evoked fields (SEFs) by applying on electric stimulus to the right finger (medium nerve and ulnar nerve) and the right ankle (posterior tibial nerve) with a 39-channel SQUID system, which can measure magnetic-field components perpendicular (B_r) and tangential to the scalp (B_θ, B_φ) simultaneously. To investigate the relationship between phase lag and stimulus repetition frequency (SRF), the delay time of a component synchronized with the SRFs was calculated by convoluting the reference signal and the measured SEF. The phase lag was linear to SRF for at least three different ranges of the SRFs in each SEF data. We simulated the SEF responses based on the results of phase-lag characteristics and determined the parameters for modeling. To quantitatively characterize the component of SEF, we proposed electric circuit model for the characteristics of phase-lag of the SEF with stimuli frequency.