Brain–Computer Interface (BCI) Applications in Mapping of Epileptic Brain Networks Based on Intracranial-EEG: An Update

Abstract

The main applications of the Brain–Computer Interface (BCI) have been in the domain of rehabilitation, control of prosthetics, and in neuro-feedback. Only a few clinical applications presently exist for the management of drug-resistant epilepsy. Epilepsy surgery can be a life-changing procedure in the subset of millions of patients who are medically intractable. Recording of seizures and localization of the Seizure Onset Zone (SOZ) in the subgroup of “surgical” patients, who require intracranial-EEG (icEEG) evaluations, remain to date the best available surrogate marker of the epileptogenic tissue. icEEG presents certain risks and challenges making it a frontier that will benefit from optimization. Despite the presentation of several novel biomarkers for the localization of epileptic brain regions (HFOs-spikes vs. Spikes for instance), integration of most in practices is not at the prime time as it requires a degree of knowledge about signal and computation. The clinical care remains inspired by the original practices of recording the seizures and expert visual analysis of rhythms at onset. It is becoming increasingly evident, however, that there is more to infer from the large amount of EEG data sampled at rates in the order of less than 1 ms and collected over several days of invasive EEG recordings than commonly done in practice. This opens the door for interesting areas at the intersection of neuroscience, computation, engineering and clinical care. Brain–Computer interface (BCI) has the potential of enabling the processing of a large amount of data in a short period of time and providing insights that are not possible otherwise by human expert readers. Our practices suggest that implementation of BCI and Real-Time processing of EEG data is possible and suitable for most standard clinical applications, in fact, often the performance is comparable to a highly qualified human readers with the advantage of producing the results in real-time reliably and tirelessly. This is of utmost importance in specific environments such as in the operating room (OR) among other applications. In this review, we will present the readers with potential targets for BCI in caring for patients with surgical epilepsy.