Automated detection of high-frequency oscillations (HFOs) identify source of seizures in epilepsy patients


Mon, 02/12/2018

Drs. Daniel Curry and Michael Quach from Texas Children’s Division of Neurology and Neurosurgery co-authored an insightful epilepsy study that was recently published in Brain, a Journal of Neurology.
 
The study was performed at four different centers in two countries and coordinated by Dr. Nuri Ince, PhD, of the University of Houston Cullen College of Engineering. Researchers discovered that automated detection of particular type of brain waves, called High Frequency Oscillations (HFOs), reliably identified the source of seizures in patients with epilepsy and distinguished these seizure-causing areas of the brain from adjacent, normal, functional brain, where other methods of detection, such as MRI or surgical examination, failed to do so.
 
Ince and his former graduate student Su Liu studied pediatric and adult brain patterns provided by collaborators at Texas Children's Hospital, Baylor College of Medicine, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Instanbul University and University of Minnesota.
 
"We observed that the high frequency oscillations in the seizure onset zone form random, repetitive waveform patterns that identify their location," Ince said. "This new discovery breakthrough is showing a dramatic decrease in the time it takes to detect the seizure onset zone which is the actual part of the brain that causes seizures in epilepsy patients."
 
Click here to read more about this study in the journal Brain. Click here for a link to the University of Houston article spotlighting this research.