History and evolution of methods for solving the inverse problem.

This article serves as an introduction to the other articles in this issue devoted to the problem of the localization of neural generators. Elements of the theory of electric volume conduction are briefly introduced, as far as these apply to the interpretation of observed scalp potentials. First, some basic methods for display of the different aspects of the spatiotemporal information are described. Next, the most prominent source and volume conductor models that have been postulated for the involved forward problem are summarized. The problems of source identification and source localization, known as the inverse problem, are then formulated in terms of a parameter estimation procedure. The importance of introducing a priori information in the inverse problem, aimed at stabilizing (regularizing) the obtained solution, is emphasized. Methods for imposing such constraints are briefly outlined.