Transcript Research on Epilepsy

 Epilepsy affects approximately one percent of the world
population. A huge chunk of the people who have epilepsy
live in 3rd world countries so they are not able to access the
medicine and treatments available now.
 Nowadays antiepileptic drugs are available but many times
they are found to be ineffective in approximately 30% of
patients and have side effects.
 All the techniques used for testing epileptic seizures, such
as deep brain stimulation and responsiveness
neurostimulation, all require invasive surgery to implant
devices.
 The objective for this project was to develop non-invasive
ways for testing epileptic seizures. My research on this
project involved building the material and equipment that
would be used for testing on patients using brain-computer
interface and electrical stimulation.

The project required building two tripolar board consisting of 20 channels. These
boards were used to test out brainwaves and were connected to computers and peoples
head in order for us to read signals.

From each channel we gathered an output on the 1/16, Outer ring, Middle Disk, and
Central Disk. For each channel on the board, there were 14 resistors placed and each
resistor ranged from 2.61KΩ to 100kΩ.

On the ends of the tripolar boards we attached the wires that would be attached to the
oscilloscope and computer in order to give us signals.

After each soldering session done on each individual channels, the connecting wires
placed on each end of the board were plugged into an oscilloscope to test out whether
each channel had been administered properly.

A voltmeter was used to determine the voltage that was coming from battery that was
attached to board, and also how much power was running across each channel. Too
much power could potentially burn out the channels gates and counters, also could
cause a shock to occur on the test subject’s head. Too little power would have the
opposite effect and not give off a strong reading.

After testing whether each channel worked, electrodes were inserted into each channel
of the tripolar board. The electrodes were attached to various parts on the head of the
person being tested. By doing so, the brain–computer interface of the project came
into play and we were able to see how didn’t thoughts and actions affected our project.

The board was then plugged into other devices that would be
computer. From there, we were able to

get signals from electrodes to the computer

on what the brain was doing at certain times.
plugged into the
partial seizure onset
HFOs
generalized seizure onset
Fig. 4. Panel B shows 12 minutes of bipolar EEG from Fp2-F4. Panel A is the corresponding
spectrogram. Panel E shows 30 seconds of EEG from Panel B at the onset of the generalized
seizure (dashed line). Panels C, D, and F are the corresponding tEEG signals from Fp2’. Notice
the black ellipse in Panel C highlighting high frequency oscillations (HFOs) just prior to the
partial seizure. The tEEG in Panel F during the tonic seizure activity was less contaminated with
muscle and movement artifacts than the EEG in Panel E. Also note the high power in EEG
(Panel A) from approx. 400 to 650 s when the patient is still anxious/disoriented and moving
much while recovering from the seizure. During that same period the artifact power is much
lower in tEEG in Panel C.
 The data and results that were attained from the brain computer
interface varied a lot. There were many times when the equipment
would fail based on the connection between the tripolar board and the
computer, the electrodes not giving a good signal to read based on their
placing, or certain parts of the board being shot. All of these results
were expected due to the fact that the research is in it’s introductory
phase and very experimental.

A lot of tedious work was put into building each of the components of
the project. The circuit design for each channel of the board, which
were done by an associate PhD student Zhenghan, required a lot of
work and knowledge of how all of the parts would be connected while
at the same time giving us the correct signal.
 The testing phase of the equipment also required a lot of work on both
the researcher and the person being tested on. The person had to direct
a specific amount of focus to the task at hand, whether it be imagining
to move the right hand or left hand, while the researcher would be busy
looking at all the data and results. All in all, the project was successful.