This research project concerns the correlations between brain energy metabolism determined by PET and resting EEG measured simultaneously in both normal and depressed human subjects. It is a subproject in the research program of Dr. Richard Davidson of th Dept. of Psychology; my sponsor, Dr. James Holden of th Depts. of Medical Physics and Radiology, is collaborator and co-investigator in the imaging projects of that program. Modeling of the anatomical and physiological effects that link the two modalities will be performed. Three primary effects will be studied. MRI data will be used to study t he anatomical effects on EEG on EEG scalp potentials that confound the relationship between scalp potentials and cortical activity. Temporal weighting techniques based on data from the PET measurements will be developed to weight the EEG data acquired over extended time periods so that the electrical and metabolic data reflect the brain activity time course in similar ways. Finally, models of source generator distributions will be studied and used to determine optimal spatial regions of interest for the spatial averaging of the metabolic data to be correlated with the EEG data. Data processed using the methods developed will be used in several statistical correlation studies.
