Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders affecting about 1% of the world population. For patients with focal seizures that cannot be treated with antiepileptic drugs, the common treatment is a surgical procedure for removal of the seizure onset zone (SOZ). In this work we introduce an algorithm for automatic localization of the seizure onset zone (SOZ) in epileptic patients based on electrocorticography (ECoG) recordings. The proposed algorithm builds upon the hypothesis that the abnormal excessive (or synchronous) neuronal activity in the brain leading to seizures starts in the SOZ and then spreads to other areas in the brain. Thus, when this abnormal activity starts, signals recorded at electrodes close to the SOZ should have a relatively large causal influence on the rest of the recorded signals. The SOZ localization is executed in two steps. First, the algorithm represents the set of electrodes using a directed graph in which nodes correspond to recording electrodes and the edges’ weights quantify the pair-wise causal influence between the recorded signals. Then, the algorithm infers the SOZ from the estimated graph using a variant of the PageRank algorithm followed by a novel post-processing phase. Inference results for 19 patients show a close match between the SOZ inferred by the proposed approach and the SOZ estimated by expert neurologists (success rate of 17 out of 19).
Brain lesion volume measured on T2 weighted MRI images is a clinically important disease marker in multiple sclerosis (MS). Manual delineation of MS lesions is a time-consuming and highly operatordependent task, which is influenced by lesion size, shape and conspicuity. Recently, automated lesion segmentation algorithms based on deep neural networks have been developed with promising results. In this paper, we propose a novel recurrent slice-wise attention network (RSANet), which models 3D MRI images as sequences of slices and captures longrange dependencies through a recurrent manner to utilize contextual information of MS lesions. Experiments on a dataset with 43 patients show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. Our implementation is available online at https://github. com/tinymilky/RSANet Keywords: magnetic resonance imaging · convolutional neural networks · long-range dependencies · multiple sclerosis lesion segmentation.
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