Baier, G;
Taylor, PN;
Wang, Y;
(2017)
Understanding Epileptiform After-Discharges as Rhythmic Oscillatory Transients.
Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience
, 11
, Article 25. 10.3389/fncom.2017.00025.
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Abstract
Electro-cortical activity in patients with epilepsy may show abnormal rhythmic transients in response to stimulation. Even when using the same stimulation parameters in the same patient, wide variability in the duration of transient response has been reported. These transients have long been considered important for the mapping of the excitability levels in the epileptic brain but their dynamic mechanism is still not well understood. To investigate the occurrence of abnormal transients dynamically, we use a thalamo-cortical neural population model of epileptic spike-wave activity and study the interaction between slow and fast subsystems. In a reduced version of the thalamo-cortical model, slow wave oscillations arise from a fold of cycles (FoC) bifurcation. This marks the onset of a region of bistability between a high amplitude oscillatory rhythm and the background state. In vicinity of the bistability in parameter space, the model has excitable dynamics, showing prolonged rhythmic transients in response to suprathreshold pulse stimulation. We analyse the state space geometry of the bistable and excitable states, and find that the rhythmic transient arises when the impending FoC bifurcation deforms the state space and creates an area of locally reduced attraction to the fixed point. This area essentially allows trajectories to dwell there before escaping to the stable steady state, thus creating rhythmic transients. In the full thalamo-cortical model, we find a similar FoC bifurcation structure. Based on the analysis, we propose an explanation of why stimulation induced epileptiform activity may vary between trials, and predict how the variability could be related to ongoing oscillatory background activity. We compare our dynamic mechanism with other mechanisms (such as a slow parameter change) to generate excitable transients, and we discuss the proposed excitability mechanism in the context of stimulation responses in the epileptic cortex.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Understanding Epileptiform After-Discharges as Rhythmic Oscillatory Transients |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.3389/fncom.2017.00025 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fncom.2017.00025 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2017 Baier, Taylor and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
| Keywords: | Afterdischarge, epilepsy model, spike-wave, stimulation, transients, NEURAL MASS MODEL, EXCITABLE SYSTEMS, ELECTRICAL-STIMULATION, CORTICAL STIMULATION, DYNAMICS, SEIZURES, INHIBITION, EPILEPSY, NETWORK, MECHANISMS |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Cell and Developmental Biology |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1557074 |
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