Topological biomarkers for real-time detection of epileptic seizures

Abstract: Real time seizure detection is a fundamental problem in computational neuroscience towards diagnosis and treatment's improvement of epileptic disease. We propose a real-time computational method for tracking and detection of epileptic seizures from raw neurophysiological recordings. Our mechanism is based on the topological analysis of the sliding-window embedding of the time series derived from simultaneously recorded channels. We extract topological biomarkers from the signals via the computation of the persistent homology of time-evolving topological spaces. Remarkably, the proposed biomarkers robustly captures the change in the brain dynamics during the ictal state. We apply our methods in different types of signals including scalp and intracranial electroencephalograms and magnetoencephalograms, in patients during interictal and ictal states, showing high accuracy in a range of clinical situations.