Measuring epileptogenicity in kainic acid injected rats

The present work aims at improving the validation of therapeutic approaches to treat temporal lobe epilepsy. Today´s antiepileptic drugs perform only poorly for this form of epilepsy, and electrical stimulation might be an alternative for these patients. Finding the optimal stimulation parameters, however, is difficult as the underlying mechanisms, both of the disease and the stimulation procedure, and even the evaluation of the therapeutic effect are still poorly understood. Here we used a method to obtain a quantitative measure - the relative phase clustering index (rPCI) - of the epileptogenicity of a brain region in a simple and straightforward way.