India designs patient friendly diagnostic tool for epilepsy

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi have come up with a non-invasive, time-efficient and patient-friendly diagnostic tool for focal epilepsy detection. The team has proposed an electroencephalogram (EEG) -based brain source localisation (BSL) framework for epileptogenic zone detection. Their study, titled ‘Anatomical harmonics basis based brain source localisation with application to epilepsy’, has been published in the Nature’s Scientific Reports. Epilepsy is the fourth most common neurological disorder in the world and affects millions worldwide. According to officials, a lot of epilepsies can be controlled by medicines, but when medicines fail to control seizures, it is labelled as drug resistant epilepsy- likely to originate from structural abnormalities of the brain and hence brain surgery offers a complete cure for these patients. But it takes 2-8 hours for Epileptogenic Zone Detection and is uncomfortable for patients. The team from IIT-D is offering solutions to the problem of tracking the origin of the electrical and structural abnormality in the brain causing the seizure. Given the EEG data with seizure, the array processing algorithms can point the coordinates within minutes.