International Epilepsy Electrophysiology Portal

One of the most exciting developments in treating people with epilepsy, since the turn of the century, is a paradigm shift in our understanding of how epileptic seizures are generated.  Rather than starting as abrupt, random events, new evidence suggests that seizure generation is probabilistic, with precursors that wax and wane before some synchronizing event triggers clinical seizures.  This line of research has given rise to devices to warn of and pre-empt seizures, some now in clinical trials, and promises exciting therapeutic benefits to patients on the horizon.

The research also has great potential to dramatically improve our understanding of the mechanisms underlying seizure generation and epileptogenesis, with even more profound clinical implications.  Unfortunately, research in this field is significantly hindered by limited access to continuous, high quality, broad-band recordings from humans implanted with intracranial electrodes, and spontaneously seizing animal models of epilepsy.  This is because these data are very expensive to acquire, extremely labor intensive, and the process of filtering, removing artifacts, and annotating recordings spanning weeks to months alone is prohibitive for all but the largest and best-funded investigative teams to undertake.  This leaves literally hundreds of qualified scientists who would be actively working in this area unable to engage in this research.

This portal represents our initial steps in constructing an international, collaborative database of broad-band, high quality, annotated intracranial data, from humans and spontaneously seizing animal models of epilepsy, centered at the University of Pennsylvania and Mayo Clinic.  Data will be collected from the highest quality facilities worldwide, and made available to all investigators: academic, private and industry, for analysis.  This effort will be the centerpiece of the International Collaborative Seizure-Prediction Group, a well-established international collaboration between the top laboratories in the world that study seizure generation, and whose meetings are supported by the National Institutes of Health, American Epilepsy Society, and European EEG Societies.

Funding

Funding is supplied by the National Institutes of Health, U24 NS063930-01.

Investigators

The investigative team consists of the following:

• Brian Litt, Associate Professor of Neurology and Biomedical Engineering, and Director of the EEG Laboratory, at the University of Pennsylvania
• Gregory Worrell, Associate Professor of Neurology, at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine
• Squire Matthew Stead, Assistant Professor of Neurology, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine
• Zachary Ives, Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science, at the University of Pennsylvania
• Piotr Julian Franaszczuk, Associate Professor of Neurology, Johns Hopkins University
• Jean Gotman, Professor, Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, McGill University
• Klaus Lehnertz, Professor, Department of Epileptology, University of Bonn, Germany
• Catherine A. Schevon, Assistant Professor of Clinical Neurology, Columbia University
• Steven J. Schiff, Directory, Center for Neural Engineering, Penn State Center for Neural Engineering
• Andreas Schulze-Bonhage, Professor of Neurology and Clinical Neurophysiology, University Hospital Freiburg
• Hitten P. Zaveri, Associate Research Scientist, Department of Neurology, Yale University