Noninvasive imaging of the high frequency brain activity in focal epilepsy patients

High-frequency (HF) activity represents a potential biomarker of the epileptogenic zone in epilepsy patients, the removal of which is considered to be crucial for seizure-free surgical outcome. We proposed a high frequency source imaging (HFSI) approach to noninvasively image the brain sources of the scalp-recorded HF EEG activity. Both computer simulation and clinical patient data analysis were performed to investigate the feasibility of using the HFSI approach to image the sources of HF activity from noninvasive scalp EEG recordings. The HF activity was identified from high-density scalp recordings after high-pass filtering the EEG data and the EEG segments with HF activity were concatenated together to form repetitive HF activity. Independent component analysis was utilized to extract the components corresponding to the HF activity. Noninvasive EEG source imaging using realistic geometric boundary element head modeling was then applied to image the sources of the pathological HF brain activity. Five medically intractable focal epilepsy patients were studied and the estimated sources were found to be concordant with the surgical resection or intracranial recordings of the patients. The present study demonstrates, for the first time, that source imaging from the scalp HF activity could help to localize the seizure onset zone and provide a novel noninvasive way of studying the epileptic brain in humans. This study also indicates the potential application of studying HF activity in the presurgical planning of medically intractable epilepsy patients.