Probing for cortical excitability

Dean R Freestone; Anthony N Burkitt; Alan Lai; Timothy S Nelson; David B Grayden; Simon Vogrin; Michael Murphy; Wendyl D'Souza; Radwa Badawy; Levin Kuhlmann; Mark J Cook

doi:10.1109/IEMBS.2011.6090474

Probing for cortical excitability

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2011:2011:1644-7. doi: 10.1109/IEMBS.2011.6090474.

Authors

Dean R Freestone¹, Anthony N Burkitt, Alan Lai, Timothy S Nelson, David B Grayden, Simon Vogrin, Michael Murphy, Wendyl D'Souza, Radwa Badawy, Levin Kuhlmann, Mark J Cook

Affiliation

¹ Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia.

PMID: 22254639
DOI: 10.1109/IEMBS.2011.6090474

Abstract

This paper introduces a new method for measuring cortical excitability using an electrical probing stimulus via intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG). Stimuli consisted of 100 single bi-phasic pulses, delivered every 10 minutes. Neural excitability is estimated by extracting a feature from the iEEG responses to the stimuli, which we dub the mean phase variance (PV). We show that the mean PV increases with the rate of inter-ictal discharges in one patient. In another patient, we show that the mean PV changes with sleep and an epileptic seizure. The results demonstrate a proof-of-principal for the method to be applied in a seizure anticipation framework.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Algorithms
Cerebral Cortex / physiopathology*
Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / methods*
Electric Stimulation / methods*
Electroencephalography / methods*
Epilepsy / diagnosis*
Epilepsy / physiopathology*
Humans
Nerve Net / physiopathology*
Reproducibility of Results
Sensitivity and Specificity