The Work No One Sees

Tim Cook’s transition from Apple’s chief executive to executive chairman offers more than a moment of corporate reflection. It invites a deeper question for science and medicine: what does it mean to make the invisible parts of our work—its methods, figures, uncertainties, and obligations to patients—worthy of a signature?

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BCI and AI applications in Epilepsy care, intracranial EEG (icEEG), and Neurology

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The main applications of the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) have been in the domain of rehabilitation, control of prosthetics, and neuro-feedback. Only a few clinical applications presently exist for the management of drug-resistant epilepsy. Epilepsy surgery can be a life-changing procedure in the subset of millions of medically intractable patients. Recording of seizures and localization of the Seizure Onset Zone (SOZ) in the subgroup of “surgical” patients, who require intracranial-EEG (icEEG) evaluations, remain to date the best available surrogate marker of the epileptogenic tissue. icEEG presents specific risks and challenges, making it a frontier that will benefit from optimization. Despite several novel biomarkers for the localization of epileptic brain regions (HFOs-spikes vs. Spikes, for instance), integration of most in practices is not at the prime time as it requires a degree of knowledge about signal and computation…

Keywords: high-frequency oscillations, high-frequency brain stimulation, single-pulse electrical stimulation, BCI, epilepsy surgery, coherence analysis, epileptogenicity index, connectivity index

Technology alone is not enough–it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.

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43-ebooks per second worth of icEEG

We have 161428000/6= 24918250 etext/sec of data. Let's divide that by the average number of letters per word: 5.75 = 4333609 individual words. This is where things start to get a little bit even more enjoyable. A typical ebook with 100,000 words, which implies that the EEG readings were taken from only 5-10% of the brain's surface, produces the equivalent of 43 average ebooks per second of abstract voltage data... amazing.

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The Neural Networks Underlying the Illusion of Time Dilation

Did you know: The Babylonians, who used a sexagesimal (60-based) system for mathematics and astronomy, divided the hour into 60 minutes and the minute into 60 seconds. They built their number system from the Sumerians, using it as early as 3500 BC. The Egyptians invented a more sophisticated sundial as early as 1500 B.C. This instrument was carefully calibrated to split the duration between sunrise and sunset into 12 parts.

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Reply to: Association of Cortical Stimulation–Induced Seizure With Surgical Outcome in Patients With Focal Drug-Resistant Epilepsy

Taken together and while we agree with the authors about the overall supplementing value of electrical stimulation-induced seizures and that single-pulse induced seizures are predictive yet not sensitive for induction of typical seizures and hence the localization of the epileptogenic zone3, we emphasize the careful interpretation of 50 Hz stimulation-induced seizures. Correlating those seizures with the habitual electroclinical syndrome is crucial4, especially when employing specific EEG techniques with limited spatial sampling. The differences in performance metrics between the stimulation techniques likely stem from the partially known complex mechanisms underlying 50 Hz modulation of the epileptic network compared to the direct voltage-based effects of a single pulse. The conclusions and the discussion in the manuscript could have benefited from more clarity about this immediate patient care matter.

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