SUMMARY: The authors propose a probabilistic model and MAP inference for localizing seizure onset zones (SOZ) using intracranial EEG data. The proposed model captures spatial correlations across EEG channels as well as temporal correlations within a channel. The authors claim that modeling these correlations leads to improved predictions when compared to detection methods that ignore temporal and spatial dependency. PROS: This is a fairly solid applications paper, well-written, well-motivated, and an interesting application. CONS: The proof of Prop. 1 is not totally clear, for example the energy in Eq. (4) includes a penalty for label disagreement across channels, which is absent in the the graph cut energy provided by the proof.

This paper presents a probabilistic-graphical model that can be used to infer characteristics of instantaneous brain activity by jointly analyzing spatial and temporal dependencies observed in electroencephalograms (EEG). Specifically, we describe a factor-graph-based model with customized factor-functions defined based on domain knowledge, to infer pathologic brain activity with the goal of identifying seizure-generating brain regions in epilepsy patients. We utilize an inference technique based on the graph-cut algorithm to exactly solve graph inference in polynomial time. We validate the model by using clinically collected intracranial EEG data from 29 epilepsy patients to show that the model correctly identifies seizure-generating brain regions. Our results indicate that our model outperforms two conventional approaches used for seizure-onset localization (5-7% better AUC: 0.72, 0.67, 0.65) and that the proposed inference technique provides 3-10% gain in AUC (0.72, 0.62, 0.69) compared to sampling-based alternatives. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.