Skip to main content
  • Poster presentation
  • Open access
  • Published:

On the spatiotemporal dynamics and couplings across epileptogenic networks

For patients with partial epilepsy, one or several brain regions generate seizures ('epileptogenic zone' [1]), which may recruit other regions that are themselves non-epileptogenic. For these patients, the epileptogenic zone can sometimes be surgically removed and thus must be precisely delineated using intracranial EEG, giving us a deeper insight into the spatiotemporal dynamic of the seizure.

Intracranial EEG times series show that brain regions and seizures may display a large variability in dynamics: (i) some seizures recruit more brain regions than others, (ii) the delays between the onset of the seizure in the epileptogenic zone and other areas can change on a time scale of several seconds, (iii) recruited areas exhibit different levels of coherence with the epileptogenic zone according to their position.

Here we propose a model able to reproduce these 3 features (for other macroscopic models of seizures see [2, 3]). Our network model comprises two neural masses autonomously able to produce epileptic seizure. We symmetrically coupled two of these neural mass models on a slow time scale (several seconds) and studied systematically the effect of two parameters : the epileptogenicity of the neural masses and the coupling values between neural masses. By choosing specific values of these parameters, we reproduce each of the features above (see Figure 1). We mathematically reduced the network model to uncover the essential mechanisms underlying a coupling acting on a slow time scale.

Figure 1
figure 1

Simultaneous times series of two coupled neural masses. The neural mass 1 starts first the seizure and then recruits the neural mass 2.

References

  1. Bartolomei F, Guye M, Gavaret M, Regis J, Wendling F, Raybaud C, Chauvel P: The presurgical evaluation of epilepsies. Rev Neurol (Paris). 2002, 158 (Pt 2): 4S55-4S64.

    CAS  Google Scholar 

  2. Wendling F, Bartolomei F, Bellanger F, Chauvel P: Epileptic fast activity can be explained by a model of impaired GABAergic dendritic inhibition. Eur J Neurosci. 2002, 15: 1499-508. 10.1046/j.1460-9568.2002.01985.x.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  3. Suffczynski P, Kalitzin S N, Lopes Da Silva F H: Dynamics of non-convulsive epileptic phenomena modeled by a bistable neuronal network. Neuroscience. 2004, 126 (2): 467-484. 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2004.03.014.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This research has been supported by the James S. McDonnell Foundation.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Timothée Proix.

Rights and permissions

This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Proix, T., Jirsa, V. On the spatiotemporal dynamics and couplings across epileptogenic networks. BMC Neurosci 14 (Suppl 1), P196 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2202-14-S1-P196

Download citation

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2202-14-S1-P196

Keywords