Effect of Vigilance Changes on the Incidence of High Frequency Oscillations in the Epileptic Brain

Recent studies show that the rate of cortical high frequency oscillations (HFOs) differentiates epileptogenic tissue in individuals with epilepsy. However, HFO occurrence can vary widely with vigilance state. In this study we attempt to characterize this variation, which has implications for the choice of a suitable diagnostic baseline for spatiotemporal analysis of HFO activity. We analyzed simultaneous recordings of the scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) and the electrocorticogram (ECoG) to examine the correlation of HFO activity with vigilance state. We detected HFOs (80–500 Hz) from all bipolar ECoG derivations using the well-known Staba algorithm in ten seizure-free overnight recordings from five patients being evaluated for surgery. In addition, we classified EEG features using a linkage tree into four vigilance states representing gradations in sleep depth from wakefulness to slow wave sleep. Finally, we examined the correlation between vigilance state and HFO occurrence in the five channels with the most HFOs in each recording. The proportion of 30-s epochs containing HFOs was found to increase significantly with sleep depth (p<0.01). Further analysis is necessary to examine the effects of epoch length and sample size in the choice of diagnostic baseline.