Imbalance of community structures in epilepsy

GUILLERMO ORTEGA; JESÚS PASTOR; RAFAEL GARCÍA DE SOLA

Journal of Physics: Conference Series

IOP Publishing

Año: 2010 vol. 246 p. 1 - 10

1742-6596

Epilepsy is commonly associated with synchronous activity in the form of spikesand also in developed seizures. Desynchronised activity seems to play an important role also inthe seizure process, favouring the initiation of seizures. The aim of the present work is toexplore synchronization activity in the inner areas in the temporal lobe of epileptic patients bya novel approach. Two temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients’ records have been analyzedthrough a cluster analysis. Electrical activity in the inner part of the temporal has been recordedby using Foramen Ovale Electrodes (FOE), a semi-invasive technique frequently used in drugresistant epileptic patients. Instead of tracking synchronized activity, we give here specialattention to desynchronized activity, mainly those areas which are not included insynchronization clusters. Our results show that electrical activity in the epileptic side behavesin a less cohesive fashion than the contra-lateral side. There exists a clear tendency in theepileptic side to be organized as isolated clusters of electrical activity as compared with thecontra-lateral side, which is organized in the form of large clusters of synchronous activity. Inparticular, we shall give special attention to the cluster desynchronization during the seizures.As we shall show, our results can help in understand several characteristics of the seizuresdynamics.