Kanupriya Gupta, a second-year PSTP student mentored by Taylor Abel, MD, recently authored a review paper in Frontiers in Neurology. This review explores past findings describing the connectivity of the epileptogenic zone (EZ), which is the region that produces seizures in patients with epilepsy, during resting-state, pre-ictal, and ictal states using stereotactic electroencephalography (SEEG). The EZ exhibits high inward connectivity during resting-state, which may act as a control mechanism preventing seizure onset. However, during a seizure, the EZ displays high outward connectivity, possibly allowing it to spread epileptogenic activity and recruit other brain areas to the seizure. As a seizure progresses, the EZ seems to lose its connectivity to other areas of the brain, which is then regained a few minutes after the seizure. Her review paper highlights the need for more studies that evaluate how the connectivity of the EZ changes over time in order to build a robust clinical biomarker of the EZ.
You can read Kanupriya's entire paper at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2020.569699/full