Localization of Epileptic Focus Using Simultaneously Acquired EEG-FMRI Data

Affecting daily lives of millions of people, Epilepsy is a common central nervous system (neurological) disorder where cell activity in the brain is disturbed, causing recurrent seizures. Epilepsy can be treated commonly by medications. Be that as it may, medications do not always work as one may hope, and thus, some patients tend to resort to surgeries. The primary challenge in such surgeries, and by extension any other surgery where some part of brain may need to be disabled, disconnected or removed, is managing to pose no threat to the critical healthy textures adjacent or close to the part being operated on. Therefore, the precise localization of epileptic focus is a matter of vital importance in treating this condition. Various algorithms have been proposed to localize the brain sources and thus to determine the epileptic focus; however, none has yet been able to offer a solution to effectively address this issue. With EEG signal containing temporal information and fMRI carrying spatial information, it is hoped that the combination of the two can yield optimal results. In this research, we first remove the artifacts caused by EEG gradients, and proceed to study the signal in and outside the scanner by localizing the brain sources. The simultaneous processing of EEG-fMRI enables us to make use of the temporal information in EEG to analyze fMRI. Epileptic foci are finally localized based on GLM method. This study has been conducted on 10 medication-resistant patients with epilepsy whose data was recorded in Iran National Brain Mapping Centre. The results suggest a significant improvement in localization accuracy compared to existing methods in the literature.