Localizing Epileptic Foci Using Simultaneous EEG-fMRI Recording: Template Component Cross-Correlation

Elias Ebrahimzadeh 1,2*, Mohammad Shams 3, Masoud Seraji 4,5, Seyyed Mostafa Sadjadi 1, Lila Rajabion 6 and Hamid Soltanian-Zadeh 1,2,7

۱CIPCE, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
۲School of Cognitive Sciences, Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), Tehran, Iran
۳Neural Engineering Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, United States
۴Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, United States
۵Behavioral and Neural Sciences Graduate Program, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, United States
۶School of Graduate Studies, SUNY Empire State College, Manhattan, NY, United States
۷Image Analysis Laboratory, Departments of Radiology and Research Administration, Henry Ford Health System, Detroit, MI, United States

Conventional EEG-fMRI methods have been proven to be of limited use in the sense that they cannot reveal the information existing in between the spikes. To resolve this issue, the current study obtains the epileptic components time series detected on EEG and uses them to fit the Generalized Linear Model (GLM), as a substitution for classical regressors. This approach allows for a more precise localization, and equally importantly, the prediction of the future behavior of the epileptic generators. The proposed method approaches the localization process in the component domain, rather than the electrode domain (EEG), and localizes the generators through investigating the spatial correlation between the candidate components and the spike template, as well as the medical records of the patient. To evaluate the contribution of EEG-fMRI and concordance between fMRI and EEG, this method was applied on the data of 30 patients with refractory epilepsy. The results demonstrated the significant numbers of 29 and 24 for concordance and contribution, respectively, which mark improvement as compared to the existing literature. This study also shows that while conventional methods often fail to properly localize the epileptogenic zones in deep brain structures, the proposed method can be of particular use. For further evaluation, the concordance level between IED-related BOLD clusters and Seizure Onset Zone (SOZ) has been quantitatively investigated by measuring the distance between IED/SOZ locations and the BOLD clusters in all patients. The results showed the superiority of the proposed method in delineating the spike-generating network compared to conventional EEG-fMRI approaches. In all, the proposed method goes beyond the conventional methods by breaking the dependency on spikes and using the outside-the-scanner spike templates and the selected components, achieving an accuracy of 97%. Doing so, this method contributes to improving the yield of EEG-fMRI and creates a more realistic perception of the neural behavior of epileptic generators which is almost without precedent in the literature