Dynamic inverse problem solution considering non-homogeneous source distribution with frequency spatio temporal constraints applied to brain activity reconstruction

Para reconstruir la actividad cerebral es necesario estimular la ubicación de las fuentes activas del cerebro. El método de localización de fuentes usando electroencefalogramas es usado para esta tarea por su alta resolución temporal. Este método de resolver un problema inverso mal planteado, el cual no tiene una solución única debido al que el números de variables desconocidas es mas grande que el numero de variables conocidas. por lo tanto el método presenta una baja resolución espacial..

Localization of the epileptogenic foci using Support Vector Machine

Epileptic foci localization is a crucial step in planning surgical treatment of medically intractable epilepsy. The solution to this problem can be determined by the detection of the earliest time of seizure onset in electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings. This study presents the application of support vector machine (SVM) for localization of the focus region at the epileptic seizure on the basis of EEG signals. We used intracranial EEG recordings from patients suffering from pharmacoresistant focal-onset epilepsy. We have been investigating a localization of the focus region at the epileptic seizure based on SVM to detect the onset of seizure activity in EEG data. The SVM is trained on sets of intracranial EEG recordings from patients suffering from pharmacoresistant focal-onset epilepsy. The performance of SVM is measured by using accuracy obtained from a fit between the target value and network output. Our EEG based localization of the focus region at the epileptic seizure approach achieves 97.4% accuracy with using 10-fold cross validation. Therefore, our method can be successfully applied to localization of the epileptogenic foci

Dynamic inverse problem solution considering non-homogeneous source distribution with frequency spatio temporal constraints applied to brain activity reconstruction

Para reconstruir la actividad cerebral es necesario estimular la ubicación de las fuentes activas del cerebro. El método de localización de fuentes usando electroencefalogramas es usado para esta tarea por su alta resolución temporal. Este método de resolver un problema inverso mal planteado, el cual no tiene una solución única debido al que el números de variables desconocidas es mas grande que el numero de variables conocidas. por lo tanto el método presenta una baja resolución espacial..

Detection and Magnetic Source Imaging of Fast Oscillations (40–160 Hz) Recorded with Magnetoencephalography in Focal Epilepsy Patients

We present a framework to detect fast oscillations (FOs) in magnetoencephalography (MEG) and to perform magnetic source imaging (MSI) to determine the location and extent of their generators in the cortex. FOs can be of physiologic origin associated to sensory processing and memory consolidation. In epilepsy, FOs are of pathologic origin and biomarkers of the epileptogenic zone. Seventeen patients with focal epilepsy previously confirmed with identified FOs in scalp electroencephalography (EEG) were evaluated. To handle data deriving from large number of sensors (275 axial gradiometers) we used an automatic detector with high sensitivity. False positives were discarded by two human experts. MSI of the FOs was performed with the wavelet based maximum entropy on the mean method. We found FOs in 11/17 patients, in only one patient the channel with highest FO rate was not concordant with the epileptogenic region and might correspond to physiologic oscillations. MEG FOs rates were very low: 0.02–4.55 per minute. Compared to scalp EEG, detection sensitivity was lower, but the specificity higher in MEG. MSI of FOs showed concordance or partial concordance with proven generators of seizures and epileptiform activity in 10/11 patients. We have validated the proposed framework for the non-invasive study of FOs with MEG. The excellent overall concordance with other clinical gold standard evaluation tools indicates that MEG FOs can provide relevant information to guide implantation for intracranial EEG pre-surgical evaluation and for surgical treatment, and demonstrates the important added value of choosing appropriate FOs detection and source localization methods.Facultad de IngenieríaInstituto de Investigaciones en Electrónica, Control y Procesamiento de Señale

Advances in Neural Signal Processing

Neural signal processing is a specialized area of signal processing aimed at extracting information or decoding intent from neural signals recorded from the central or peripheral nervous system. This has significant applications in the areas of neuroscience and neural engineering. These applications are famously known in the area of brain–machine interfaces. This book presents recent advances in this flourishing field of neural signal processing with demonstrative applications

Advances in Neural Signal Processing

Neural signal processing is a specialized area of signal processing aimed at extracting information or decoding intent from neural signals recorded from the central or peripheral nervous system. This has significant applications in the areas of neuroscience and neural engineering. These applications are famously known in the area of brain–machine interfaces. This book presents recent advances in this flourishing field of neural signal processing with demonstrative applications

Machine Learning for Understanding Focal Epilepsy

The study of neural dysfunctions requires strong prior knowledge on brain physiology combined with expertise on data analysis, signal processing, and machine learning. One of the unsolved issues regarding epilepsy consists in the localization of pathological brain areas causing seizures. Nowadays the analysis of neural activity conducted with this goal still relies on visual inspection by clinicians and is therefore subjected to human error, possibly leading to negative surgical outcome. In absence of any evidence from standard clinical tests, medical experts resort to invasive electrophysiological recordings, such as stereoelectroencephalography to assess the pathological areas. This data is high dimensional, it could suffer from spatial and temporal correlation, as well as be affected by high variability across the population. These aspects make the automatization attempt extremely challenging. In this context, this thesis tackles the problem of characterizing drug resistant focal epilepsy. This work proposes methods to analyze the intracranial electrophysiological recordings during the interictal state, leveraging on the presurgical assessment of the pathological areas. The first contribution of the thesis consists in the design of a support tool for the identification of epileptic zones. This method relies on the multi-decomposition of the signal and similarity metrics. We built personalized models which share common usage of features across patients. The second main contribution aims at understanding if there are particular frequency bands related to the epileptic areas and if it is worthy to focus on shorter periods of time. Here we leverage on the post-surgical outcome deriving from the Engel classification. The last contribution focuses on the characterization of short patterns of activity at specific frequencies. We argue that this effort could be helpful in the clinical routine and at the same time provides useful insight for the understanding of focal epilepsy