Papanicolaou AC. Clinical Magnetoencephalography and Magnetic Source Imaging. Cambridge Medicine 2009, 220 pages, 32 illustrations, $100.
The book Clinical Magnetoencephalography and Magnetic Source Imaging is a useful handbook edited by Dr. Andrew Papanicolou, published in 2009 by Cambridge University Press. This slender handbook is the result of collective efforts by a number of members of the International Society for Advancement of Clinical Magnetoencephalography (ISACM). The book articulates the empirical knowledge gained by this group on the use of magnetoencephalography (MEG) and magnetic source imaging (MSI). The intent is to introduce and to familiarize new users of this imaging modality with its concepts and applications. Given that this is an ever increasing field of research and a growing community of scientists and clinicians, any handbook can attempt to provide a brief snapshot of the current status of a field, and this book achieves that goal. The constraints of brevity are so severe that many currently dominant ideas do not get the full exposure and treatment. Nevertheless, it is an impressive task by this team to attempt such a herculean effort to catalog the many concepts and current ideas of this growing field.
The book is organized in three sections. The first section introduces the basic concepts in the modality of MEG – starting from the nature and the origin of the magnetic signals, recording of magnetic flux and a very brief overview of the dominant methods for source reconstructions in clinical practice—namely the single equivalent current dipole modeling. The latter part of this section deals with head models and more advanced source reconstruction methods that are yet to be widely used in clinical practice, although many such methods are used in many academic MEG centers. These include distributed source modeling methods and beamformers. The section concludes with an overview of some of the practical tools available to MEG users. There is considerable omission in scholarship in this section, presumably due to the constraints of brevity. Nevertheless, the section touches upon the main ideas and concepts in the field, and a more interested reader will have to follow the vast primary and secondary literature to more carefully expand their understanding of the many ideas put forth in this section. The second section of the book deals with normal and abnormal spontaneous brain activity observed with MEG, followed by a discussion of clinical application of MEG in various epilepsies. Many practical examples of both artifacts and MEG counterparts of well-known EEG waves are provided with figures which could be very useful for novice users. The third section focuses on the evoked magnetic field response, the magnetic counterpart to the event-related potentials (ERPs). Somatosensory, auditory, visual, movement and language-related evoked fields are discussed. The section, however, only briefly mentions many spectral fluctuation methods that are popular in the field as an alternative to time-locked averaging methods. The final section of the book is an overview of the future clinical applications of MEG and MSI in a variety of neurological disorders including degenerative ones such as dementia, vascular disorders like stroke and development disorders like autism, as well as psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia. Again, this section serves mainly as a teaser to highlight the burgeoning number of novel clinical application for this imaging modality.
MEG and MSI has now become an integral part of the repertoire of neuroimaging tools for a cognitive neuroscientist. This book hopefully will serve to introduce a vast literature on this topic to novice users and serve as an invitation to sustained use of this imaging modality.
