Abstract
Complexity science has provided new perspectives and opportunities for understanding a variety of complex natural or social phenomena, including brain dysfunctions like epilepsy. By delving into the complexity in electrophysiological signals and neuroimaging, new insights have emerged. These discoveries have revealed that complexity is a fundamental aspect of physiological processes. The inherent nonlinearity and non-stationarity of physiological processes limits the methods based on simpler underlying assumptions to point out the pathway to a more comprehensive understanding of their behavior and relation with certain diseases. The perspective of complexity may benefit both the research and clinical practice through providing novel data analytics tools devoted for the understanding of and the intervention about epilepsies. This review aims to provide a sketchy overview of the methods derived from different disciplines lucubrating to the complexity of bio-signals in the field of epilepsy monitoring. Although the complexity of bio-signals is still not fully understood, bundles of new insights have been already obtained. Despite the promising results about epileptic seizure detection and prediction through offline analysis, we are still lacking robust, tried-and-true real-time applications. Multidisciplinary collaborations and more high-quality data accessible to the whole community are needed for reproducible research and the development of such applications.
Highlights
Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological dysfunctions, affecting about 1% of the world population [1]
The concepts and and methods derived nonlinear signal processing, nonlinear dynamics, network science methods derived fromfrom nonlinear signal processing, nonlinear dynamics, and and network science are are employed as feature extractors
Fractal theory comes from the study of geometry
Summary
Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological dysfunctions, affecting about 1% of the world population [1]. Recurrent epileptic seizures accompanied with their neurobiological and cognitive consequences impact patients with epilepsy negatively and consistently. As a chronic disease with age-related features, epilepsy has a huge adverse effect on the quality of life (QoL) of patients, including cognitive impairment, decreased ability of daily activities and the possible social stigma. A fully understanding of the etiology of epilepsy is not yet available. The onset of an epileptic seizure is usually accompanied by electrophysiological anomalies and/or behavioral manifestations. The abnormal synchronized discharge of groups of neurons can happen to the whole brain or originates from several foci and propagates to the whole hemisphere and even the contralateral hemisphere. The clinical manifestations of seizures vary from uncontrolled convulsions of limbs to impaired awareness and pain. Anti-epilepsy drugs are commonly used in the treatment of epilepsy, but it is reported that there
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