Computing network-based features from intracranial EEG time series data: Application to seizure focus localization

The surgical resection of the epileptogenic zone (EZ) is the only effective treatment for many drug-resistant epilepsy (DRE) patients, but the pre-surgical identification of the EZ is challenging. This study investigates whether the EZ exhibits a computationally identifiable signature during seizures. In particular, we compute statistics of the brain network from intracranial EEG (iEEG) recordings and track the evolution of network connectivity before, during, and after seizures. We define each node in the network as an electrode and weight each edge connecting a pair of nodes by the gamma band cross power of the corresponding iEEG signals. The eigenvector centrality (EVC) of each node is tracked over two seizures per patient and the electrodes are ranked according to the corresponding EVC value. We hypothesize that electrodes covering the EZ have a signature EVC rank evolution during seizure that differs from electrodes outside the EZ. We tested this hypothesis on multi-channel iEEG recordings from 2 DRE patients who had successful surgery (i.e., seizures were under control with or without medications) and 1 patient who had unsuccessful surgery. In the successful cases, we assumed that the resected region contained the EZ and found that the EVC rank evolution of the electrodes within the resected region had a distinct “arc” signature, i.e., the EZ ranks first rose together shortly after seizure onset and then fell later during seizure.