Epileptic Seizure: A New Approach for Quantification of Autonomic Deregulation with Chaos Based Technique

Abstract

Background: Epileptic seizures can lead to changes in autonomic function affecting the sympathetic, parasympathetic and enteric nervous systems. Changes in cardiac signals are potential biomarkers that may provide an extra-cerebral indicator of ictal onset in some patients. Patients suffering from epilepsy experience some significant cardiac changes during seizure, causing some serious cardiac malfunctions which may lead to sudden unexpected death (SUDEP). The fluctuations observed in the heart rate during the process are non-linear and extremely complex. Chaos based non-linear methodology has become a very powerful tool in recent years in analysing such complex systems. Although a few papers on effect of seizure have been reported where study was done to assess the dynamics of cardiac systems for post-ictal patients not using non-linear technique, this paper reports the analysis of ECG signals of post-ictal patients using a modern and rigorous non-linear technique.