Weekly Scientist: New Diagnostic tool for "automatic" epilepsy diagnosis?

Sunday, January 10, 2010

New Diagnostic tool for "automatic" epilepsy diagnosis?

By Mike Martin for Epilepsy USA

A new system that may help to “automate” epilepsy diagnosis has sparked an updated version of an old debate: Is medicine—in this case, clinical neurology— more art than science or more science than art?

Supplementing clinical expertise with artificial intelligence, researchers from Texas Tech University in Lubbock and China’s Jiangsu Provincial Hospital in Nanjing have used a computer algorithm to interpret so-called “interictal” or between-seizure electroencephalogram (EEG) data.

In a paper for the 2009 IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society conference, the research team—which includes computer scientists, electrical engineers, a neurologist, and two neurosurgeons—claims the algorithm correctly identified epileptiform EEG data with about 94 percent accuracy.

Though automated epilepsy diagnosis is not a new concept, the study also claims an important advance: the use of so-called “artificial probabilistic neural networks” to interpret scalp—rather than intracranial (inside the skull)—EEG data.

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1 comment:

maggie.danhakl@healthline.com said...: Hi,

I hope all is well with you. Healthline just published an infographic detailing the effects of epilepsy on the body. This is an interactive chart allowing the reader to pick the side effect they want to learn more about.

You can see the overview of the report here: http://www.healthline.com/health/epilepsy/effects-on-body

Our users have found our guide very useful and I thought it would be a great resource for your page: http://weeklyscientist.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-diagnostic-tool-for-automatic.html

I would appreciate it if you could review our request and consider adding this visual representation of the effects of epilepsy to your site or sharing it on your social media feeds.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

All the best,
Maggie Danhakl • Assistant Marketing Manager

Healthline • The Power of Intelligent Health
660 Third Street, San Francisco, CA 94107
www.healthline.com | @Healthline | @HealthlineCorp

About Us: corp.healthline.com; February 6, 2015 at 11:40 AM

About Mike Martin

A former senior science writer for United Press International, Mike Martin has written articles for Science, The Scientist, Harvard Magazine, MIT's Technology Review, and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

His clients include the Epilepsy Foundation, the Association of American Medical Colleges, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the California, Oregon, and Missouri university systems.

A member of the National Press Club and the National Association of Science Writers, Martin specializes in news about early-stage university and laboratory research.

He was a science journalism fellow at Duke University's National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Fall 2011, where he completed two stories about Margie Profet -- one for the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and a second for Psychology Today. The latter piece led to a happy ending to her 8-year missing person story.

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