Portrait of My Father: Frida Kahlo’s Intimate Relation to Epilepsy

The painting <i>Portrait of My Father</i> (1951) by the Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo, is discussed by the author within the context of epilepsy and biographical events in the lives of both Frida and her father, the German Mexican photographer Guillermo Kahlo. The biographical accounts of the photographer’s seizures are suggestive of juvenile absence epilepsy but cannot discount the possibility of posttraumatic epilepsy of mesial frontal origin.

Computationally-Efficient Algorithm for Real-Time Absence Seizure Detection in Wearable Electroencephalography

Advances in electroencephalography (EEG) equipment now allow monitoring of people with epilepsy in their daily-life environment. The large volumes of data that can be collected from long-term out-of-clinic monitoring require novel algorithms to process the recordings on board of the device to identify and log or transmit only relevant data epochs. Existing seizure-detection algorithms are generally designed for post-processing purposes, so that memory and computing power are rarely considered as constraints. We propose a novel multi-channel EEG signal processing method for automated absence seizure detection which is specifically designed to run on a microcontroller with minimal memory and processing power. It is based on a linear multi-channel filter that is precomputed offline in a data-driven fashion based on the spatial-temporal signature of the seizure and peak interference statistics. At run-time, the algorithm requires only standard linear filtering operations, which are cheap and efficient to compute, in particular on microcontrollers with a multiply-accumulate unit (MAC). For validation, a dataset of eight patients with juvenile absence epilepsy was collected. Patients were equipped with a 20-channel mobile EEG unit and discharged for a day-long recording. The algorithm achieves a median of 0.5 false detections per day at 95% sensitivity. We compare our algorithm with state-of-the-art absence seizure detection algorithms and conclude it performs on par with these at a much lower computational cost.

Genetic generalized epilepsy

This chapter provides an overview of generalized epilepsies (GGE), which comprises a group of epilepsy syndromes of presumed genetic origin. They are classified into several syndromes according to their age, depending on clinical manifestation and associated electroencephalogram (EEG) features. The chapter introduces the concept of GGE before addressing different GGE syndromes, describing their clinical presentation, EEG features, treatment, prognosis, and underlying genetics. The following GGE syndromes are discussed in order of their age of onset—myoclonic astatic epilepsy, childhood absence epilepsy, epilepsy with myoclonic absences, eyelid myoclonia with absences, juvenile absence epilepsy, juvenile myoclonic epilepsy, and epilepsy with generalized tonic seizures on awakening. This is followed by an overview on pathophysiological mechanisms underlying GGE.