Dynamic imaging of seizure activity in pediatric epilepsy patients

Objective

To investigate the feasibility of using noninvasive EEG source imaging approach to image continuous seizure activity in pediatric epilepsy patients.

Methods

Nine pediatric patients with medically intractable epilepsy were included in this study. Eight of the patients had extratemporal lobe epilepsy and one had temporal lobe epilepsy. All of the patients underwent resective surgery and seven of them underwent intracranial EEG (iEEG) monitoring. The ictal EEG was analyzed using a noninvasive dynamic seizure imaging (DSI) approach. The DSI approach separates scalp EEGs into independent components and extracts the spatio-temporal ictal features to achieve dynamic imaging of seizure sources. Surgical resection and intracranial recordings were used to validate the noninvasive imaging results.

Results

The DSI determined seizure onset zones (SOZs) in these patients were localized within or in close vicinity to the surgically resected region. In the seven patients with intracranial monitoring, the estimated seizure onset sources were concordant with the seizure onset zones of iEEG. The DSI also localized the multiple foci involved in the later seizure propagation, which were confirmed by the iEEG recordings.

Conclusions

Dynamic seizure imaging can noninvasively image the seizure activations in pediatric patients with both temporal and extratemporal lobe epilepsy.

Significance

EEG seizure imaging can potentially be used to noninvasively image the SOZs and aid the pre-surgical planning in pediatric epilepsy patients.