Signal quality of endovascular electroencephalography

Bryan D He,Mosalam Ebrahimi,Lakshminarayan Srinivasan,Leon Palafox

doi:10.1088/1741-2560/13/1/016016

Abstract

Objective, Approach. A growing number of prototypes for diagnosing and treating neurological and psychiatric diseases are predicated on access to high-quality brain signals, which typically requires surgically opening the skull. Where endovascular navigation previously transformed the treatment of cerebral vascular malformations, we now show that it can provide access to brain signals with substantially higher signal quality than scalp recordings. Main results. While endovascular signals were known to be larger in amplitude than scalp signals, our analysis in rabbits borrows a standard technique from communication theory to show endovascular signals also have up to 100× better signal-to-noise ratio. Significance. With a viable minimally-invasive path to high-quality brain signals, patients with brain diseases could one day receive potent electroceuticals through the bloodstream, in the course of a brief outpatient procedure.

Highlights

The detailed spatial and temporal dynamics of electric potentials recorded from intracranial electrodes predict motor intent, detect seizure onset, and reflect the dynamics of memory and decision making
The risks and drawbacks of neurosurgery to achieve intracranial electroencephalography limits the clinical application of sophisticated algorithms based on these electrodes to a subset of patients and experimental settings
We examined the effect of electrode impedance on the overall ability for the data acquisition system to measure neural signals at different frequencies

Summary

Introduction

The detailed spatial and temporal dynamics of electric potentials recorded from intracranial electrodes predict motor intent, detect seizure onset, and reflect the dynamics of memory and decision making. Neuroscience has largely relied on skull perforation or skull opening to place electrodes that access neural signals with kilohertz-wide frequency content, millisecond temporal resolution, and submillimeter spatial resolution. A total of 101 123 patients were hospitalized for epilepsy. Of these patients, 40% (40 942) received scalp EEG monitoring and only 6% (6422) underwent intracranial EEG monitoring, with a comparable percentage of patients going on to epilepsy surgery (Schiltz et al 2013). With the recent emergence of promising new surgical techniques for the management of epilepsy (Nowell et al 2014), access to definitive diagnosis through intracranial recording may represent a chokepoint in disseminating these compelling therapies

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Conclusion