IIT Delhi researchers propose a non-invasive, time efficient and patient-friendly diagnostic tool for epileptogenic zone detection

Quite a lot of epilepsies can be controlled by medicines, however, when medicines fail to control seizures, it is labelled as drug-resistant epilepsy. 

Drug-resistant epilepsies are most likely to originate from structural abnormalities of the brain and hence brain surgery offers a complete cure for these patients, provided the exact origin and extent of abnormality are identified by a neurosurgeon. The most complex and tedious task in surgical evaluation is to determine the origin of electrical abnormality and correlate it with a structural abnormality of the brain. 

These structural abnormalities are so subtle to be identified on MRI alone and always to be interpreted along with electroencephalogram (EEG) evaluation. Other modalities utilised by neurosurgeons are positron emission tomography (PET) scan and Magnetoencephalography (MEG). PET scan involves the intake of a radioactive substance. The MEG facility is very limited in India. Craniotomy and Robot-assisted surgery are invasive where clinicians drill holes into the skull to place electrodes on the brain. It takes 2-8 hours for Epileptogenic Zone Detection and is uncomfortable for patients. 

A team of researchers at IIT Delhi led by Prof Lalan Kumar, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Delhi, has come up with a non-invasive EEG-based Brain Source Localization (BSL) framework for epilepsy focal detection that is time efficient and patient-friendly. Given the EEG data with seizures, the array processing algorithms can point to the coordinates within minutes. In particular, the researchers have proposed novel head harmonics-based algorithms for seizure localisation.  

Dr Amita Giri, a Prime Minister’s Research Fellows (PMRF) in the Department of Electrical Engineering at IIT Delhi, has developed the novel epileptic region detection method as a major part of her PhD work. The other members of the research team include Prof. Tapan K. Gandhi, Electrical Engineering Dept., IIT Delhi and Dr Nilesh Kurwale, Deenanath Mangeshkar Hospital and Research Center, Pune, Maharashtra, India.

Their study titled ‘Anatomical harmonics basis based brain source localisation with application to epilepsy’ was published in Nature’s Scientific Reports.

The researchers have validated the proposed source localisation algorithms on clinical EEG data for epileptogenic zone localisation. The proposed framework offers an effective solution to clinicians in automated and time efficient seizure localisation.

Your e-mail information will not be shared with anyone else. And it will be used only to send out our latest news.

BW Communities is an array of business news websites targeted towards niche communities and readers across various industries

© Copyright BW Education 2016. All Rights Reserved.