Amplitude entropy captures chimera resembling behavior in the altered brain dynamics during seizures

Epilepsy is a neurological disease characterized by epileptic seizures, which commonly manifest with pronounced frequency and amplitude changes in the EEG signal. In the case of focal seizures, initially localized pathological activity spreads from a so-called “onset zone” to a wider network of brain areas. Chimeras, defined as states of simultaneously occurring coherent and incoherent dynamics in symmetrically coupled networks are increasingly invoked for characterization of seizures. In particular, chimera-like states have been observed during the transition from a normal (asynchronous) to a seizure (synchronous) network state. However, chimeras in epilepsy have only been investigated with respect to the varying phases of oscillators. We propose a novel method to capture the characteristic pronounced changes in the recorded EEG amplitude during seizures by estimating chimera-like states directly from the signals in a frequency- and time-resolved manner. We test the method on a publicly available intracranial EEG dataset of 16 patients with focal epilepsy. We show that the proposed measure, titled Amplitude Entropy, is sensitive to the altered brain dynamics during seizure, demonstrating its significant increases during seizure as compared to before and after seizure. This finding is robust across patients, their seizures, and different frequency bands. In the future, Amplitude Entropy could serve not only as a feature for seizure detection, but also help in characterizing amplitude chimeras in other networked systems with characteristic amplitude dynamics.