Abstract
Epilepsy is a common neurological disorder characterized by recurrent seizures, most of which appear to occur spontaneously as a result of complex dynamical interactions among many regions of the brain. The most common type of epilepsy in adults is temporal lobe epilepsy. Employment of nonlinear dynamics techniques, based on the chaos theory, led us to the hypotheses that (1) seizures are a transition from spatiotemporal chaos to a more ordered ictal (symptomatic) state, (2) during the interictal (asymptomatic) state, the epileptogenic focus is dynamically isolated from other areas of the cerebral hemispheres, (3) the seizure discharge can occur only after a preictal transition state during which the focus starts to interact with other cortical areas (preictal state), and (4) the seizure serves to reset the brain, reversing the pathological interaction among critical cortical sites, thus dynamically isolating the seizure onset zone.
Through the analysis of long-term intracranial EEG recordings obtained in patients with medically intractable seizures, we observed: (1) drop in values of a dynamical measure (STL max ) during the seizure, indicating increased temporal order of the EEG signal — hypothesis 1, (2) convergence of STL max values among almost all electrode pairs, indicating increased spatial order — hypothesis 1, (3) generally higher values of T index (divergent values of STL max ) during the interictal state when the epileptogenic focus is compared to other sites — hypothesis 2, (4) the average differences in STL max values between the epileptogenic hippocampus and most other sites is typically reduced (low T-index values, “dynamical entrainment”) prior to each seizure — hypothesis 3, and (5) a divergence of STL max (increase in the T-index) between the epileptogenic hippocampus and other cortical sites after each seizure — hypothesis 4. These observations support our hypotheses regarding the preictal transitions in temporal lobe epilepsy. We anticipate that these observations will lead to a better understanding of the physiological processes involved in temporal lobe epilepsy.
Keywords
This work was supported by the Department of Veterans Affairs and grant from NIH/NIBIB (8R01EB002089-03).
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Sackellares, J.C., Iasemidis, L.D., Shiau, DS., Pardalos, P.M., Carney, P.R. (2004). Spatiotemporal Transitions in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. In: Pardalos, P.M., Sackellares, J.C., Carney, P.R., Iasemidis, L.D. (eds) Quantitative Neuroscience. Biocomputing, vol 2. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0225-4_12
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