IIT Delhi researchers come up with non-invasive tool for epileptogenic zone identification

New Delhi: Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi have developed a non-invasive, time-efficient, and patient-friendly diagnostic tool for focal epilepsy detection.

The team has proposed an electroencephalogram-based brain source localization (BSL) framework for epileptogenic zone detection. The study, titled 'Anatomical harmonics basis based brain source localization with application to epilepsy', has been published in Nature's scientific reports.

Epilepsy is the fourth most common neurological disorder in the world and affects millions worldwide. It involves brief episodes of involuntary body (partial/entire) movement called seizures and may be accompanied by loss of consciousness and control of bowel or bladder function, primarily due to erroneous excessive electrical discharges.

According to officials, 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, they said.

"Given the EEG data with seizure, the array processing algorithms can point the coordinates within minutes. We have proposed the utilization of spherical harmonics and head harmonics basis functions for seizure Localization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt in non-invasive and time-efficient seizure Localization," said Lalan Kumar, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Delhi.

"The researchers have validated the proposed source localization algorithms on clinical EEG (electroencephalogram) data for epileptogenic zone localization. The proposed framework offers an effective solution to clinicians in automated and time-efficient seizure localization. It is a breakthrough considering the comfort of patients," he added.

Amita Giri, a Prime Minister's Research Fellow (PMRF) in the Department of Electrical Engineering at IIT Delhi, has developed the novel epileptic region detection method as a major part of her Ph.D. work. Other members of the team included Tapan K Gandhi, Professor at IIT Delhi, and Nilesh Kurwale, Deenanath Mangeshkar Hospital and Research Center, Pune.