Analysis of synchronization phenomena in human electroencephalograms with nonlinear excitable media

We apply the method of frequency-selective excitation waves in excitable media to characterize synchronization phenomena in interacting complex dynamical systems by measuring coincidence rates of induced excitations. We analyzed time series of coupled nonlinear model systems and multi-channel, multi-day electroencephalographic recordings from epilepsy patients that we used as local perturbations to our media. We show that the method allows one to estimate the degree of zero-lag phase synchronization even in noisy signals and can be applied for the analysis of human electroencephalograms with the aim of epileptic seizure prediction.