An official website of the United States government
Summary The human brain is a directional network system, in which brain regions are network nodes and the influence exerted by one region on another is a network edge. We refer to this directional information flow from one region to another as directional connectivity. Seizures arise from an epileptic directional network; abnormal neuronal activities start from a seizure onset zone and propagate via a network to otherwise healthy brain regions. As such, effective epilepsy diagnosis and treatment require accurate identification of directional connections among regions, i.e., mapping of epileptic patients’ brain networks. This article aims to understand the epileptic brain network using intracranial electroencephalographic data—recordings of epileptic patients’ brain activities in many regions. The most popular models for directional connectivity use ordinary differential equations (ODE). However, ODE models are sensitive to data noise and computationally costly. To address these issues, we propose a high-dimensional state-space multivariate autoregression (SSMAR) model for the brain’s directional connectivity. Different from standard multivariate autoregression and SSMAR models, the proposed SSMAR features a cluster structure, where the brain network consists of several clusters of densely connected brain regions. We develop an expectation–maximization algorithm to estimate the proposed model and use it to map the interregional networks of epileptic patients in different seizure stages. Our method reveals the evolution of brain networks during seizure development.
more »
« less
An Unobtrusive and Lightweight Ear-worn System for Continuous Epileptic Seizure Detection
Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological diseases globally, affecting around 50 million people worldwide. Fortunately, up to 70 percent of people with epilepsy could live seizure-free if properly diagnosed and treated, and a reliable technique to monitor the onset of seizures could improve the quality of life of patients who are constantly facing the fear of random seizure attacks. The scalp-based EEG test, despite being the gold standard for diagnosing epilepsy, is costly, necessitates hospitalization, demands skilled professionals for operation, and is discomforting for users. In this paper, we propose EarSD, a novel lightweight, unobtrusive, and socially acceptable ear-worn system to detect epileptic seizure onsets by measuring the physiological signals from behind the user's ears. EarSD includes an integrated custom-built sensing, computing, and communication PCB to collect and amplify the signals of interest, remove the noises caused by motion artifacts and environmental impacts, and stream the data wirelessly to the computer or mobile phone nearby, where data are uploaded to the host computer for further processing. We conducted both in-lab and in-hospital experiments with epileptic seizure patients who were hospitalized for seizure studies. The preliminary results confirm that EarSD can detect seizures with up to 95.3 percent accuracy by just using classical machine learning algorithms.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1846541
- PAR ID:
- 10522466
- Publisher / Repository:
- Arxiv
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Brain functional network connectivity is an important measure for characterizing changes in a variety of neurological disorders, for example Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson Disease, and Epilepsy. Epilepsy is a serious neurological disorder affecting more than 50 million persons worldwide with severe impact on the quality of life of patients and their family members due to recurrent seizures. More than 30% of epilepsy patients are refractive to pharmacotherapy and are considered for resection to disrupt epilepsy seizure networks. However, 20-50% of these patients continue to have seizures after surgery. Therefore, there is a critical need to gain new insights into the characteristics of epilepsy seizure networks involving one of more brain regions and accurately delineate epileptogenic zone as a target for surgery. Although there is growing availability of large volume of high resolution stereotactic electroencephalogram (SEEG) data recorded from intracranial electrodes during presurgical evaluation of patients, there are significant informatics challenges associated with processing and analyzing this large signal dataset for characterizing epilepsy seizure networks. In this paper, we describe the development and application of a high-performance indexing structure for efficient retrieval of large-scale SEEG signal data to compute seizure network patterns corresponding to brain functional connectivity networks. This novel Neuro-Integrative Connectivity (NIC) search and retrieval method has been developed by extending the red-black tree index model together with an efficient lookup algorithm. We systematically perform a comparative evaluation of the proposed NIC index using de-identified SEEG data from a patient with temporal lobe epilepsy to retrieve segments of signal data corresponding to multiple seizure events and demonstrate the significant advantages of the NIC index as compared to existing methods. This new NIC Index enables faster computation of brain functional connectivity measures in epilepsy patients for large-scale network analysis and potentially provide new insights into the organization as well as evolution of seizure networks in epilepsy patients.more » « less
-
Epilepsy affects approximately 50 million people worldwide. Despite its prevalence, the recurrence of seizures can be mitigated only 70% of the time through medication. Furthermore, surgery success rates range from 30% - 70% because of our limited understanding of how a seizure starts. However, one leading hypothesis suggests that a seizure starts because of a critical transition due to an instability. Unfortunately, we lack a meaningful way to quantify this notion that would allow physicians to not only better predict seizures but also to mitigate them. Hence, in this paper, we develop a method to not only characterize the instability of seizures but also to leverage these conditions to stabilize the system underlying these seizures. Remarkably, evidence suggests that such critical transitions are associated with long-term memory dynamics, which can be captured by considering linear fractional-order systems. Subsequently, we provide for the first time tractable necessary and sufficient conditions for the global asymptotic stability of discrete-time linear fractional-order systems. Next, we propose a method to obtain a stabilizing control strategy for these systems using linear matrix inequalities. Finally, we apply our methodology to a real-world epileptic patient dataset to provide insight into mitigating epilepsy and designing future cyber-neural systems.more » « less
-
Abstract One-third of epilepsy patients suffer from medication-resistant seizures. While surgery to remove epileptogenic tissue helps some patients, 30–70% of patients continue to experience seizures following resection. Surgical outcomes may be improved with more accurate localization of epileptogenic tissue. We have previously developed novel thin-film, subdural electrode arrays with hundreds of microelectrodes over a 100–1000 mm2 area to enable high-resolution mapping of neural activity. Here, we used these high-density arrays to study microscale properties of human epileptiform activity. We performed intraoperative micro-electrocorticographic recordings in nine patients with epilepsy. In addition, we recorded from four patients with movement disorders undergoing deep brain stimulator implantation as non-epileptic controls. A board-certified epileptologist identified microseizures, which resembled electrographic seizures normally observed with clinical macroelectrodes. Recordings in epileptic patients had a significantly higher microseizure rate (2.01 events/min) than recordings in non-epileptic subjects (0.01 events/min; permutation test, P = 0.0068). Using spatial averaging to simulate recordings from larger electrode contacts, we found that the number of detected microseizures decreased rapidly with increasing contact diameter and decreasing contact density. In cases in which microseizures were spatially distributed across multiple channels, the approximate onset region was identified. Our results suggest that micro-electrocorticographic electrode arrays with a high density of contacts and large coverage are essential for capturing microseizures in epilepsy patients and may be beneficial for localizing epileptogenic tissue to plan surgery or target brain stimulation.more » « less
-
Epileptic seizures are dangerous. They render patients unconscious and can lead to death within seconds of onset. There is, therefore, the need for a very fast and accurate seizure detection mechanism. Kriging methods have been used extensively in geostatistics for spatial prediction and are known for very high accuracy. By modeling the brain as a spatial map, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Kriging Methods for efficient seizure detection in an edge computing paradigm. We explore three different types of Kriging - Simple Kriging, Ordinary Kriging and Universal Kriging. Results from various experiments with electroencephalogram (EEG) signals of both healthy and diseased patients show that all three Kriging methods have good performance in terms of accuracy, sensitivity and detection latency. However, Simple Kriging emerged as the slight favorite for seizure detection with a mean detection latency of 0.81 sec, an accuracy of 97.50%, a sensitivity of 94.74% and a perfect specificity. Simple Kriging is at least 5% better than Ordinary Kriging and Universal Kriging when evaluated at 68.2% confidence interval. The results obtained in this paper compare favorably with other seizure detection models in the literature.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Data Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
