Comparison of five directed graph measures for identification of leading interictal epileptic regions

Abstract

Directed graphs (digraphs) derived from interictal periods of intracerebral EEG (iEEG) recordings can be used to estimate the leading interictal epileptic regions for presurgery evaluations. For this purpose, quantification of the emittance contribution of each node to the rest of digraph is important. However, the usual digraph measures are not very well suited for this quantification. Here, we compare the efficiency of recently introduced local information (LI) measure and a new measure called total global efficiency with classical measures like global efficiency, local efficiency and node degree. For evaluation, the estimated leading interictal epileptic regions based on five measures are compared with seizure onset zones obtained by visual inspection of epileptologists for five patients. The comparison revealed the superior performance of the LI measure. We showed efficiency of different digraph measures for the purpose of source and sink node identification.