Closed-loop Epileptic Seizure Detection
Speaker: Professor Herming Chiueh
Faculty Host: Professor Jonathan Chao
Abstract
In recent years, alternative treatments and devices are proposed to investigate and treat epilepsy in addition to pharmacological and surgical treatments. Several prosthesis devices with deep brain stimulation (DBS) or vagus nerve stimulation are becoming popular treatments for epilepsy clients. These devices use open-loop continuous neural stimulations to control medical refractory epilepsies complementarily with the limited effective rate around 45%. Besides, by using continuous stimulations and an implantable battery, lifetime of such a device is often limited and periodically operations for clients are required to replace the battery/devices. To overcome the above limitations, this talk reviews our recent research on the neural prosthetic device with closed-loop epileptic seizure detection and conditional therapeutic stimulation. The low-power analog front-end and bio-signal processing circuitries are used to detect the seizure’s signal before it propagates to the whole cortex and activating stimulations to stop the seizure. The integrated circuitries and electrodes are developed and verified. A prototype portable seizure controller is assembled according to designed circuits with real-time seizure detection algorithms. Preliminarily experimental tests were done in two epileptic animal models using Long-Evans rats, indicating at least 92% seizure detection rate and suppression of seizure activity by conditional stimulation. Animal tests using the portable device with integrated chips and electrodes are currently undergoing. The proposed prosthetic device with closed-loop epileptic seizure detection and stimulation yields offers a promising treatment for absence epilepsy.
About the Speaker
Herming Chiueh received his B.S. degree in Electrophysics from National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from University of Southern California, Los Angeles. From 1996 to 2002, he was with Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, CA. He has participated with the VLSI effort on several large projects in USC/ISI and most recently participated with the development of a 55-million transistor processing-in-memory (PIM) chip. He currently serves as an Assistant Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Deputy Director of the Biomimetic Systems Research Center at National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. His research interests include system-on-chip design methodology, low-power integrated circuits, mixed-signal circuits and systems, neural interface circuits, and biomimetic systems.