Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 227, 697–705 (2018)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2018-800013-1

Regular Article

Does the onset of epileptic seizure start from a bifurcation point?

¹ Biomedical Engineering Department, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran 15875-4413, Iran
² Neuroscience Research Center, Baqiyatallah University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

^a e-mail: mrhashemigolpayegani@gmail.com

Received: 31 January 2018
Received in final form: 16 April 2018
Published online: 19 October 2018

Abstract

Detection of epileptic seizures is a major challenge of these days. There are lots of papers which pay their attention to this subject. Recently, some dynamical disease with attacks such as epilepsy are considered as a system in which critical slowing down can be seen before their attacks (seizure). Although there are not many researches on the prediction of seizures using this phenomenon. Recently [P. Milanowski, P. Suffczynski, Int. J. Neural Syst. 26, 1650053 (2016)] have investigated the application of critical slowing down indicators and surprisingly they found that only in 8% of nearby 300 epileptic patients have the evidence of critical slowing down before seizures. The main goal of this paper is finding the answer of the important question “can we trust that epileptic seizures are bifurcations in the neural system”. In order to find the answer, different studies on the prediction of seizure are investigated and we prove that features which are used in those papers are critical slowing down indicators although they are not aware of it. So we present some reasons for the occurrence of critical slowing down before the seizure. We hope that this study will be a motivation of future studies on the application of critical slowing down indicators for predicting epileptic seizures.