Pairwise and higher-order measures of brain-heart interactions in children with temporal lobe epilepsy.

While it is well-known that epilepsy has a clear impact on the activity of both the central nervous system (CNS) and the autonomic nervous system (ANS), its role on the complex interplay between CNS and ANS has not been fully elucidated yet. In this work, pairwise and higher-order predictability measures based on the concepts of Granger Causality (GC) and partial information decomposition (PID) were applied on time series of electroencephalographic (EEG) brain wave amplitude and heart rate variability (HRV) in order to investigate directed brain-heart interactions associated with the occurrence of focal epilepsy.HRV and the envelopes ofandEEG activity recorded from ipsilateral (ipsi-EEG) and contralateral (contra-EEG) scalp regions were analyzed in 18 children suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy monitored during pre-ictal, ictal and post-ictal periods.

Image-based MRI gradient estimation.

In order to reduce geometric distortion phenomena in MR images, every MRI system main magnet undergoes a shimming process. Since this process aims at optimizing magnetic field homogeneity within a so-called uniformity sphere, image quality outside this sphere is neglected. Since the fields vary smoothly in space, MR signal-to-noise ratio is still non-zero just outside the uniformity region, but correction of MR image distortion fails due to lack of magnetic field knowledge outside it.