title: Towards a large-scale model of patient-specific epileptic spike-wave discharges.
abstract: Clinical electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings of the transition into generalised epileptic seizures show a sudden onset of spike-wave dynamics from a low-amplitude irregular background. In addition, non-trivial and variable spatio-temporal dynamics are widely reported in combined EEG/fMRI studies on the scale of the whole cortex. It is unknown whether these characteristics can be accounted for in a large-scale mathematical model with fixed heterogeneous long-range connectivities. Here, we develop a modelling framework with which to investigate such EEG features. We show that a neural field model composed of a few coupled compartments can serve as a low-dimensional prototype for the transition between irregular background dynamics and spike-wave activity. This prototype then serves as a node in a large-scale network with long-range connectivities derived from human diffusion-tensor imaging data. We examine multivariate properties in 42 clinical EEG seizure recordings from 10 patients diagnosed with typical absence epilepsy and 50 simulated seizures from the large-scale model using 10 DTI connectivity sets from humans. The model can reproduce the clinical feature of stereotypy where seizures are more similar within a patient than between patients, essentially creating a patient-specific fingerprint. We propose the approach as a feasible technique for the investigation of patient-specific large-scale epileptic features in space and time.
authors.affiliation: Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre, The University of Manchester, Manchester M1 7DN, UK. peter.taylor@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
authors.forename: Peter Neal
authors.initials: PN
authors.lastname: Taylor
authors.forename: Marc
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Goodfellow
authors.forename: Yujiang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Gerold
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Baier
mesh_terms: D000200:Action Potentials; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004827:Epilepsy / Q000503:physiopathology*; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008962:Models, Theoretical