Epileptic network activity revealed by dynamic functional connectivity in simultaneous EEG-fMRI

Abstract

Recent findings highlighted the non-stationarity of brain functional connectivity (FC) during resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), encouraging the development of methods allowing to explore brain network dynamics. This appears particularly relevant when dealing with brain diseases involving dynamic neuronal processes, like epilepsy. In this study, we introduce a new method to pinpoint connectivity changes related to epileptic activity by integrating EEG and dynamic FC information. To our knowledge, no previous work has attempted to integrate dFC with the epileptic activity from EEG. The detailed results obtained from the analysis of two patients successfully detected specific patterns of connections/disconnections related to the epileptic activity and highlighted the potential of a dynamic analysis for a better understanding of network organisation in epilepsy.