[Detrended fluctuation analysis of epileptic rat EEG]

Detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) is a new technique used to characterize the long-range temporal correlation (LRTC) structure of non-stationary time series, which has been applied in electroencephalographic (EEG) oscillations and diseases such as Alzheimer and stroke. In this paper, DFA is used to study the scaling exponents of intracranial EEG recordings of Pilocarpine-induced epileptic rat. It was found that when the brain functional status changed from non-epileptiform discharges to continuous-epileptiform discharges and to period-epileptiform discharges, the average scaling exponents of four brain regions (left cortex and left hippocampus, right cortex and right hippocampus) changed from 0.97 to 0.82 and to 0.94, and a statistically significant difference between the brain functional states was shown by paired T test (P < 0.05), thus suggesting that the local neuronal network dynamics of the three brain function states may be different. But in regard to the three brain function states, there is no statistically significant difference between the four brain regions(P >0.05).