MEG/EEG Analysis of Inter-ictal Activities on Epilepsy Patients

Abstract

Noninvasive imaging of epileptogenic zone is important to the diagnosis and surgical resection treatment for epilepsy patients. The aim of this study is to investigate the use of inter-ictal activities to localize epileptogenic brain from noninvasive EEG/MEG recordings in patients with medically intractable epilepsy. A pipeline with spatiotemporal analysis added to classical spike analysis framework was proposed and tested. In the analysis of 4 patients, along with high-density EEG/MEG recording and source imaging technique, the sources estimated from the inter-ictal spikes partially agreed with the epileptogenic zones identified clinically. The propagations from spatiotemporal analysis were shown to be more related to the outcome of epilepsy surgery, as compared to the classical method alone. Results from this study indicate that the proposed pipeline could outperform the classical analysis method to identify the underlying epileptic network, therefore determine the seizure onset zone more accurately. The MEG/EEG analysis of inter-ictal activities on epilepsy patients using the proposed pipeline could serve as a valuable non-invasive tool during pre-surgical diagnosis.