Automated analysis of seizure semiology and brain electrical activity in presurgery evaluation of epilepsy: A focused survey

Abstract

Epilepsy being one of the most prevalent neurological disorders, affecting approximately 50 million people worldwide, and with almost 30–40% of patients experiencing partial epilepsy being nonresponsive to medication, epilepsy surgery is widely accepted as an effective therapeutic option. Presurgical evaluation has advanced significantly using noninvasive techniques based on video monitoring, neuroimaging, and electrophysiological and neuropsychological tests; however, certain clinical settings call for invasive intracranial recordings such as stereoelectroencephalography (SEEG), aiming to accurately map the eloquent brain networks involved during a seizure. Most of the current presurgical evaluation procedures focus on semiautomatic techniques, where surgery diagnosis relies immensely on neurologists’ experience and their time-consuming subjective interpretation of semiology or the manifestations of epilepsy and their correlation with the brain's electrical activity. Because surgery misdiagnosis reaches a rate of 30%, and more than one-third of all epilepsies are poorly understood, there is an evident keen interest in improving diagnostic precision using computer-based methodologies that in the past few years have shown near-human performance. Among them, deep learning has excelled in many biological and medical applications, but has advanced insufficiently in epilepsy evaluation and automated understanding of neural bases of semiology. In this paper, we systematically review the automatic applications in epilepsy for human motion analysis, brain electrical activity, and the anatomoelectroclinical correlation to attribute anatomical localization of the epileptogenic network to distinctive epilepsy patterns. Notably, recent advances in deep learning techniques will be investigated in the contexts of epilepsy to address the challenges exhibited by traditional machine learning techniques. Finally, we discuss and propose future research on epilepsy surgery assessment that can jointly learn across visually observed semiologic patterns and recorded brain electrical activity.