Onset of poly-spike complexes in a mean-field model of human EEG and its application to absence epilepsy

In this paper we introduce a modification of a mean-field model used to describe the brain’s electrical activity as recorded via Electroencephalography (EEG). The focus of the present study is to understand the mechanisms giving rise to dynamics observed during absence epilepsy, one of the classical generalized syndromes. A systematic study of data from a number of different subjects with absence epilepsy demonstrates a wide variety of dynamical phenomena in the recorded EEG. In addition to the classical spike and wave activity, there may be poly-spike and wave, wave-spike or even no discernible spike-wave onset during seizure events. The model we introduce is able to capture all of these different phenomena and we describe the bifurcations giving rise to these different types of seizure activity. We argue that such a model may provide a useful clinical tool for classifying different sub-classes of absence epilepsy.