Quadratic Binary Programming and Dynamical System Approach to Determine the Predictability of Epileptic Seizures

Epilepsy is one of the most common disorders of the nervous system. The progressive entrainment between an epileptogenic focus and normal brain areas results to transitions of the brain from chaotic to less chaotic spatiotemporal states, the epileptic seizures. The entrainment between two brain sites can be quantified by the T-index from the measures of chaos (e.g., Lyapunov exponents) of the electrical activity (EEG) of the brain. By applying the optimization theory, in particular quadratic zero-one programming, we were able to select the most entrained brain sites 10 minutes before seizures and subsequently follow their entrainment over 2 hours before seizures. In five patients with 3–24 seizures, we found that over 90% of the seizures are predictable by the optimal selection of electrode sites. This procedure, which is applied to epilepsy research for the first time, shows the possibility of prediction of epileptic seizures well in advance (19.8 to 42.9 minutes) of their occurrence.