Analysis of Epileptic Seizures with Complex Network

Epilepsy is a disease of abnormal neural activities involving large area of brain networks. Until now the nature of functional brain network associated with epilepsy is still unclear. Recent researches indicate that the small world or scale-free attributes and the occurrence of highly clustered connection patterns could represent a general organizational principle in the human brain functional network. In this paper, we seek to find whether the small world or scale-free property of brain network is correlated with epilepsy seizure formation. A mass neural model was adopted to generate multiple channel EEG recordings based on regular, small world, random, and scale-free network models. Whether the connection patterns of cortical networks are directly associated with the epileptic seizures was investigated. The results showed that small world and scale-free cortical networks are highly correlated with the occurrence of epileptic seizures. In particular, the property of small world network is more significant during the epileptic seizures.