Schemes for Fusion of EEG and ECG Towards Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Diagnostics

The brain-heart system can be considered as a coupled dynamical control system in which bioenergetic processes in the brain have an autonomic influence in the heart. Hence, temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) can induce a modification of the cardiac rhythm: in the case of fully developed temporal lobe epilepsy, this modification tends to consist of tachycardia. In this paper we investigate this phenomenon through the introduction of a biomarker based on electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings, sensitive to fully-developed TLE seizures but also partial non-TLE seizures, whose diagnostic towards TLE is reinforced through data fusion by a biomarker based on electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings. The different schemes of information fusion are investigated as part of the uncertainty reduction problem.