A head phantom study of frontal lobe epilepsy localization with multi-channel acoustoelectric brain imaging

Acoustoelectric brain imaging (ABI) is a new modality for mapping brain electrical activity. This study demonstrates the feasibility of multi-channel ABI for frontal lobe epilepsy localization with millimeter spatial resolution. First, the feasibility of frontal signal detection of ABI is investigated with different electrode configurations in both simulation and head phantom experiments. Both single-channel and multi-channel ABI are considered. And the simulated EEG is also conducted for comparison. Besides, with multi-channel ABI, performance of frontal lobe epilepsy location is investigated. With head phantom experiment, three kinds of frontal lobe seizures are discussed, including focal onset, focal to bilateral tonic-clonic and bilateral onset. The average offsets of EEG map and single-channel ABI are 17mm and 2.8mm respectively, and spatial resolutions are 15.6mm and 5.8mm respectively. Consistent with simulation results, spatial resolution of single-channel ABI is 2.3mm and the SNR is 14.3dB. Besides, compared to that of single-channel ABI, the correlation coefficient of multi-channel ABI is improved by 10%. In Y plane, the offset of multi-channel ABI is 1.3mm, which is improved by 58% compared with single-channel ABI. What’s more, the frontal lobe epilepsy can be accurately located by multi-channel ABI with the offset less than 2mm. And the time-frequency features of frontal lobe seizure can be distinguished in hertz level. Both simulation and phantom experiment validate that multi-channel ABI can identify and locate different seizure types in both time and spatial domain within millimeter level. It is potential to bring new opportunities for non-invasive and high spatiotemporal resolution epilepsy monitoring.