Probing for cortical excitability

Dean R. Freestone, Anthony N. Burkitt, Alan Lai, Timothy S. Nelson, David B. Grayden, Simon J. Vogrin, Michael Murphy, Wendyl D'Souza, Radwa A. B. Badawy, Levin Kuhlmann, Mark J. Cook

Abstract: This paper introduces a new method for measuring cortical excitability using an electrical probing stimulus via intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG). Stimuli consisted of 100 single bi-phasic pulses, delivered every 10 minutes. Neural excitability is estimated by extracting a feature from the iEEG responses to the stimuli, which we dub the mean phase variance (PV). We show that the mean PV increases with the rate of interictal discharges in one patient. In another patient, we show that the mean PV changes with sleep and an epileptic seizure. The results demonstrate a proof-of-principal for the method to be applied in a seizure anticipation framework.