Automatic response assessment in regions of language cortex in epilepsy patients using ecog-based functional mapping and machine learning

Accurate localization of brain regions responsible for language and cognitive functions in Epilepsy patients should be carefully determined prior to surgery. Electrocorticography (ECoG)-based Real Time Functional Mapping (RTFM) has been shown to be a safer alternative to the electrical cortical stimulation mapping (ESM), which is currently the clinical/gold standard. Conventional methods for analyzing RTFM signals are based on statistical comparison of signal power at certain frequency bands. Compared to gold standard (ESM), they have limited accuracies when assessing channel responses. In this study, we address the accuracy limitation of the current RTFM signal estimation methods by analyzing the full frequency spectrum of the signal and replacing signal power estimation methods with machine learning algorithms, specifically random forest (RF), as a proof of concept. We train RF with power spectral density of the time-series RTFM signal in supervised learning framework where ground truth labels are obtained from the ESM. Results obtained from RTFM of six adult patients in a strictly controlled experimental setup reveal the state of the art detection accuracy of ≈ 78% for the language comprehension task, an improvement of 23% over the conventional RTFM estimation method. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study exploring the use of machine learning approaches for determining RTFM signal characteristics, and using the whole-frequency band for better region localization. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of machine learning based RTFM signal analysis method over the full spectrum to be a clinical routine in the near future.