EEG source imaging is an established technique for identifying the origin of interictal and ictal epileptiform discharges in patients with epilepsy, and it is an important tool in neurophysiology ...research. Accurate and reliable EEG source imaging requires appropriate choices of how the head, skull, and scalp are modeled, and understanding of the different approaches to modeling is important to guide these choices. Similarly, numerous different approaches to modeling the electrical sources within the brain exist, and appropriate understanding of the strengths and limitations of each are essential to obtaining accurate, reliable, and interpretable solutions. This review aims to describe the essential theoretical basis for these head and source models while also discussing the practical implications of each in clinical or research applications.
Management of drug resistant focal epilepsy would be greatly assisted by a reliable warning system capable of alerting patients prior to seizures to allow the patient to adjust activities or ...medication. Such a system requires successful identification of a preictal, or seizure-prone state. Identification of preictal states in continuous long- duration intracranial electroencephalographic (iEEG) recordings of dogs with naturally occurring epilepsy was investigated using a support vector machine (SVM) algorithm. The dogs studied were implanted with a 16-channel ambulatory iEEG recording device with average channel reference for a mean (st. dev.) of 380.4 (+87.5) days producing 220.2 (+104.1) days of intracranial EEG recorded at 400 Hz for analysis. The iEEG records had 51.6 (+52.8) seizures identified, of which 35.8 (+30.4) seizures were preceded by more than 4 hours of seizure-free data. Recorded iEEG data were stratified into 11 contiguous, non-overlapping frequency bands and binned into one-minute synchrony features for analysis. Performance of the SVM classifier was assessed using a 5-fold cross validation approach, where preictal training data were taken from 90 minute windows with a 5 minute pre-seizure offset. Analysis of the optimal preictal training time was performed by repeating the cross validation over a range of preictal windows and comparing results. We show that the optimization of feature selection varies for each subject, i.e. algorithms are subject specific, but achieve prediction performance significantly better than a time-matched Poisson random predictor (p<0.05) in 5/5 dogs analyzed.
There exist significant clinical and basic research needs for accurate, automated seizure detection algorithms. These algorithms have translational potential in responsive neurostimulation devices ...and in automatic parsing of continuous intracranial electroencephalography data. An important barrier to developing accurate, validated algorithms for seizure detection is limited access to high-quality, expertly annotated seizure data from prolonged recordings. To overcome this, we hosted a kaggle.com competition to crowdsource the development of seizure detection algorithms using intracranial electroencephalography from canines and humans with epilepsy. The top three performing algorithms from the contest were then validated on out-of-sample patient data including standard clinical data and continuous ambulatory human data obtained over several years using the implantable NeuroVista seizure advisory system. Two hundred teams of data scientists from all over the world participated in the kaggle.com competition. The top performing teams submitted highly accurate algorithms with consistent performance in the out-of-sample validation study. The performance of these seizure detection algorithms, achieved using freely available code and data, sets a new reproducible benchmark for personalized seizure detection. We have also shared a 'plug and play' pipeline to allow other researchers to easily use these algorithms on their own datasets. The success of this competition demonstrates how sharing code and high quality data results in the creation of powerful translational tools with significant potential to impact patient care.
High-frequency oscillations (HFOs) are a promising biomarker for localizing epileptogenic brain and guiding successful neurosurgery. However, the utility and translation of noninvasive HFOs, although ...highly desirable, is impeded by the difficulty in differentiating pathological HFOs from nonepileptiform high-frequency activities and localizing the epileptic tissue using noninvasive scalp recordings, which are typically contaminated with high noise levels. Here, we show that the consistent concurrence of HFOs with epileptiform spikes (pHFOs) provides a tractable means to identify pathological HFOs automatically, and this in turn demarks an epileptiform spike subgroup with higher epileptic relevance than the other spikes in a cohort of 25 temporal epilepsy patients (including a total of 2,967 interictal spikes and 1,477 HFO events). We found significant morphological distinctions of HFOs and spikes in the presence/absence of this concurrent status. We also demonstrated that the proposed pHFO source imaging enhanced localization of epileptogenic tissue by 162% (∼5.36 mm) for concordance with surgical resection and by 186% (∼12.48 mm) with seizure-onset zone determined by invasive studies, compared to conventional spike imaging, and demonstrated superior congruence with the surgical outcomes. Strikingly, the performance of spike imaging was selectively boosted by the presence of spikes with pHFOs, especially in patients with multitype spikes. Our findings suggest that concurrent HFOs and spikes reciprocally discriminate pathological activities, providing a translational tool for noninvasive presurgical diagnosis and postsurgical evaluation in vulnerable patients.
With continued advancement in computational technologies, the analysis of electroencephalography (EEG) has shifted from pure visual analysis to a noninvasive computational technique called EEG source ...imaging (ESI), which involves mathematical modeling of dipolar and distributed sources of a given scalp EEG pattern. ESI is a noninvasive phase I test for presurgical localization of the seizure onset zone in focal epilepsy. It is a relatively inexpensive modality, as it leverages scalp EEG and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data already collected typically during presurgical evaluation. With an adequate number of electrodes and combined with patient‐specific MRI‐based head models, ESI has proven to be a valuable and accurate clinical diagnostic tool for localizing the epileptogenic zone. Despite its advantages, however, ESI is routinely used at only a minority of epilepsy centers. This paper reviews the current evidence and practical fundamentals for using ESI of interictal and ictal epileptic activity during the presurgical evaluation of drug‐resistant patients. We identify common errors in processing and interpreting ESI studies, describe the differences in approach needed for localizing interictal and ictal EEG discharges through practical examples, and describe best practices for optimizing the diagnostic information available from these studies.
Studies suggest that self-reported seizure diaries suffer from 50% under-reporting on average. It is unknown to what extent this impacts medication management. This study used simulation to predict ...the seizure outcomes of a large heterogeneous clinic population treated with a standardized algorithm based on self-reported seizures. Using CHOCOLATES, a state-of-the-art realistic seizure diary simulator, 100 000 patients were simulated over 10 years. A standard algorithm for medication management was employed at 3 month intervals for all patients. The impact on true seizure rates, expected seizure rates, and time-to-steady-dose were computed for self-reporting sensitivities 0%-100%. Time-to-steady-dose and medication use mostly did not depend on sensitivity. True seizure rate decreased minimally with increasing self-reporting in a non-linear fashion, with the largest decreases at low sensitivity rates (0%-10%). This study suggests that an extremely wide range of sensitivity will have similar seizure outcomes when patients are clinically treated using an algorithm similar to the one presented. Conversely, patients with sensitivity ≤10% would be expected to benefit (via lower seizure rates) from objective devices that provide even small improvements in seizure sensitivity.
High-frequency oscillations (HFO; gamma: 40-100 Hz, ripples: 100-200 Hz, and fast ripples: 250-500 Hz) have been widely studied in health and disease. These phenomena may serve as biomarkers for ...epileptic brain; however, a means of differentiating between pathological and normal physiological HFO is essential. We categorized task-induced physiological HFO during periods of HFO induced by a visual or motor task by measuring frequency, duration, and spectral amplitude of each event in single trial time-frequency spectra and compared them to pathological HFO similarly measured. Pathological HFO had higher mean spectral amplitude, longer mean duration, and lower mean frequency than physiological-induced HFO. In individual patients, support vector machine analysis correctly classified pathological HFO with sensitivities ranging from 70-98% and specificities >90% in all but one patient. In this patient, infrequent high-amplitude HFO were observed in the motor cortex just before movement onset in the motor task. This finding raises the possibility that in epileptic brain physiological-induced gamma can assume higher spectral amplitudes similar to those seen in pathologic HFO. This method if automated and validated could provide a step towards differentiating physiological HFO from pathological HFO and improving localization of epileptogenic brain.
Focal seizures appear to start abruptly and unpredictably when recorded from volumes of brain probed by clinical intracranial electroencephalograms. To investigate the spatiotemporal scale of focal ...epilepsy, wide-bandwidth electrophysiological recordings were obtained using clinical macro- and research microelectrodes in patients with epilepsy and control subjects with intractable facial pain. Seizure-like events not detectable on clinical macroelectrodes were observed on isolated microelectrodes. These ‘microseizures’ were sparsely distributed, more frequent in brain regions that generated seizures, and sporadically evolved into large-scale clinical seizures. Rare microseizures observed in control patients suggest that this phenomenon is ubiquitous, but their density distinguishes normal from epileptic brain. Epileptogenesis may involve the creation of these topographically fractured microdomains and ictogenesis (seizure generation), the dynamics of their interaction and spread.