Epilepsy is a common serious neurological disorder with a complex set of possible phenotypes ranging from pathologic abnormalities to variations in electroencephalogram. This paper presents a system called Phenotype Exaction in Epilepsy (PEEP) for extracting complex epilepsy phenotypes and their correlated anatomical locations from clinical discharge summaries, a primary data source for this purpose. PEEP generates candidate phenotype and anatomical location pairs by embedding a named entity recognition method, based on the Epilepsy and Seizure Ontology, into the National Library of Medicine's MetaMap program. Such candidate pairs are further processed using a correlation algorithm. The derived phenotypes and correlated locations have been used for cohort identification with an integrated ontology-driven visual query interface. To evaluate the performance of PEEP, 400 de-identified discharge summaries were used for development and an additional 262 were used as test data. PEEP achieved a micro-averaged precision of 0.924, recall of 0.931, and F1-measure of 0.927 for extracting epilepsy phenotypes. The performance on the extraction of correlated phenotypes and anatomical locations shows a micro-averaged F1-measure of 0.856 (Precision: 0.852, Recall: 0.859). The evaluation demonstrates that PEEP is an effective approach to extracting complex epilepsy phenotypes for cohort identification.

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Some of the reported neurological manifestations of COVID-19 are encephalopathy, headache, ischemic, hemorrhagic stroke, Miller Fisher syndrome, cranial neuropathies, and Guillain-Barre syndrome. We report a case of a 75-year-old COVID-19 patient with life-threatening intracranial hemorrhage. The initial labs on admission showed D-dimer of 1.04 µg/mL, which increased to 3.74 µg/mL the next day, PT/INR of 13.7 seconds/1.2, aPTT of 22 seconds, fibrinogen of 386 mg/dL, WBC of 9.71 K/µL, Hgb of 14.1 g/dL, platelet of 315 x 10 3 /µL, LDH of 965 U/L, and CRP of 35.2 mg/dL. In addition to aspirin and Plavix (clopidogrel), the patient was started on a therapeutic dose of enoxaparin due to elevated D-dimer. A few days later, the patient had a change in the neurological examination. The CT of the head without contrast revealed a left-sided acute subdural hematoma, causing left to right midline shift, a large left temporal intraparenchymal, and subarachnoid hemorrhage with transtentorial herniation, leading to death. This case illustrates a combination of factors including hypertension, triple therapy (aspirin, clopidogrel, and enoxaparin), and underlying coagulopathy due to COVID-19, which contributed to the life-threatening intracranial hemorrhage in this patient. Therefore, this raises a concern about the safety of starting these patients preemptively on a therapeutic dose of anticoagulation.

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Patients with primary brain tumors often experience seizures, which can be the presenting symptom or occur for the first time at any point along the illness trajectory. In addition to causing morbidity, seizures negatively affect independence and quality of life in other ways, for example, by leading to loss of driving privileges. Long-term therapy with antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) is the standard of care in brain tumor patients with seizures, but the role of prophylactic AEDs in seizure-naive patients remains controversial. In this article, experts in the field discuss the issues of AED efficacy and toxicity, and explain their differing recommendations for routine use of prophylactic AEDs.

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