Conference Proceedings
Probing for cortical excitability
DR Freestone, AN Burkitt, A Lai, TS Nelson, DB Grayden, S Vogrin, M Murphy, W D'Souza, R Badawy, L Kuhlmann, MJ Cook
Proceedings of the Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society EMBS | IEEE | Published : 2011
Abstract
This paper introduces a new method for measuring cortical excitability using an electrical probing stimulus via intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG). Stimuli consisted of 100 single bi-phasic pulses, delivered every 10 minutes. Neural excitability is estimated by extracting a feature from the iEEG responses to the stimuli, which we dub the mean phase variance (PV). We show that the mean PV increases with the rate of inter-ictal discharges in one patient. In another patient, we show that the mean PV changes with sleep and an epileptic seizure. The results demonstrate a proof-of-principal for the method to be applied in a seizure anticipation framework. © 2011 IEEE.