N-Tools-Browser: Web-Based Visualization of Electrocorticography Data for Epilepsy Surgery

Abstract

Epilepsy affects more than three million people in the United States. In approximately one-third of this population, anti-seizure medications do not control seizures. Many patients pursue surgical treatment that can include a procedure involving the implantation of electrodes for intracranial monitoring of seizure activity. For these cases, accurate mapping of the implanted electrodes on a patient’s brain is crucial in planning the ultimate surgical treatment. Traditionally, electrode mapping results are presented in static figures that do not allow for dynamic interactions and visualizations. In collaboration with a clinical research team at a Level 4 Epilepsy Center, we developed N-Tools-Browser, a web-based software using WebGL and the X-Toolkit (XTK), to help clinicians interactively visualize the location and functional properties of implanted intracranial electrodes in 3D. Our software allows the user to visualize the seizure focus location accurately and simultaneously display functional characteristics (e.g., results from electrical stimulation mapping). Different visualization modes enable the analysis of multiple electrode groups or individual anatomical locations. We deployed a prototype of N-Tools-Browser for our collaborators at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine Comprehensive Epilepsy Center. Then, we evaluated its usefulness with domain experts on clinical cases.