Non-Invasive Reconstruction of Intracranial EEG Across the Deep Temporal Lobe from Scalp EEG based on Conditional Normalizing Flow

TL;DR

This paper introduces NeuroFlowNet, a novel generative framework based on Conditional Normalizing Flow, capable of reconstructing intracranial EEG signals from scalp EEG data, enhancing non-invasive deep brain activity analysis.

Contribution

NeuroFlowNet is the first model to reconstruct intracranial EEG signals from scalp EEG across the deep temporal lobe using a CNF-based approach.

Findings

NeuroFlowNet accurately reproduces temporal waveforms.

The model preserves spectral features of iEEG signals.

It effectively restores functional connectivity patterns.

Abstract

Although obtaining deep brain activity from non-invasive scalp electroencephalography (sEEG) is crucial for neuroscience and clinical diagnosis, directly generating high-fidelity intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) signals remains a largely unexplored field, limiting our understanding of deep brain dynamics. Current research primarily focuses on traditional signal processing or source localization methods, which struggle to capture the complex waveforms and random characteristics of iEEG. To address this critical challenge, this paper introduces NeuroFlowNet, a novel cross-modal generative framework whose core contribution lies in the first-ever reconstruction of iEEG signals from the entire deep temporal lobe region using sEEG signals. NeuroFlowNet is built on Conditional Normalizing Flow (CNF), which directly models complex conditional probability distributions through reversible transformations, thereby explicitly capturing the randomness of brain signals and fundamentally avoiding the pattern collapse issues common in existing generative models. Additionally, the model integrates a multi-scale architecture and self-attention mechanisms to robustly capture fine-grained temporal details and long-range dependencies. Validation results on a publicly available synchronized sEEG-iEEG dataset demonstrate NeuroFlowNet's effectiveness in terms of temporal waveform fidelity, spectral feature reproduction, and functional connectivity restoration. This study establishes a more reliable and scalable new paradigm for non-invasive analysis of deep brain dynamics. The code of this study is available in https://github.com/hdy6438/NeuroFlowNet