IIT Delhi proposes non-invasive, time-efficient and patient-friendly epilepsy zone diagnostic tool

IIT Delhi researchers have proposed a non-invasive, time-efficient and patient-friendly diagnostic tool for epilepsy focal zone detection. This can radically improve the comfort of patients when it comes to pinpointing the epileptogenic zone.

A team of researchers at IIT Delhi led by Prof Lalan Kumar, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Delhi, has come up with a non-invasive EEG based Brain Source Localization (BSL) framework for epilepsy focal detection that is time-efficient and patient-friendly.

Given the EEG data with seizure, the array processing algorithms can point to the coordinates within minutes. In particular, the researchers have proposed novel head harmonics-based algorithms for seizure localisation.

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 accompanied by loss of consciousness and control of bowel or bladder function, primarily due to erroneous excessive electrical discharges.

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 brain and hence brain surgery offers a complete cure for these patients, provided the exact origin and extent of abnormality is identified by a neurosurgeon.

The most complex and tedious task in surgical evaluation is to determine the origin of electrical abnormality in epilepsy and correlate it with structural abnormality of the brain.

These structural abnormalities are too subtle to be identified on MRI alone and need to always be interpreted along with electroencephalogram (EEG) evaluation.