Independent component analysis of short-time Fourier transforms for spontaneous EEG/MEG analysis

Analysis of spontaneous EEG/MEG needs unsupervised learning methods. While independent component analysis (ICA) has been successfully applied on spontaneous fMRI, it seems to be too sensitive to technical artifacts in EEG/MEG. We propose to apply ICA on short-time Fourier transforms of EEG/MEG signals, in order to find more “interesting” sources than with time-domain ICA, and to more meaningfully sort the obtained components. The method is especially useful for finding sources of rhythmic activity. Furthermore, we propose to use a complex mixing matrix to model sources which are spatially extended and have different phases in different EEG/MEG channels. Simulations with artificial data and experiments on resting-state MEG demonstrate the utility of the method.