Fig. 4: Analysis of thalamocortical versus corticothalamic interactions during seizures.

a Representative seizure recording (S01). The red bar indicates the full seizure duration, while the shaded gray regions show the initiation and termination epoch. On such windows, we calculated the GC coefficient matrix that illustrates connectivity from and to the thalamic nuclei to a matched SOZ. b Pie charts illustrating the proportion of seizures with higher corticothalamic (SOZ→th, light gray) or thalamocortical (th→SOZ, dark gray) GC coefficient for the initiation (left) and termination (right) epoch. c (Left) Plot of the evolution of corticothalamic and thalamocortical GC coefficients for 10 s epochs starting two minutes before a representative seizure. The arrows indicate the relative change of GC from initiation to termination. (Right) Quantification of the relative percentage change of GC coefficient from initiation to termination, for corticothalamic (light gray) and thalamocortical (dark gray) direction. d Boxplot of the relative percentage change of GC coefficient from initiation to termination for all subjects (n = 23 and n = 26). Outliers were removed with quartile method (see “Methods”). Each data point represents the mean value across all the seizures for each subject. e Pie charts illustrating the proportion of seizures with higher corticothalamic (SOZ→th, light color) or thalamocortical (th→SOZ, dark color) GC coefficient for the initiation (left) and termination (right) epoch, separated from the three nuclei of interest (PUL at left, ANT at middle, VIM/VOP at right). f Boxplot of the relative percentage change of GC coefficient from initiation to termination for all the seizures separated for the matched thalamic nucleus investigated (PUL at left, ANT at middle, VIM/VOP at right). For PUL n = 55 seizures, for ANT n = 19 and n = 20 seizures, for VIM/VOP n = 38 and n = 35 seizures. For all boxplots, the whiskers extend to the maximum spread not considering outliers, central, top, and bottom lines represent median, 25th, and 75th percentile, respectively. Outliers were removed with quartile method (see “Methods”). For all panels, statistical significance and rejection of the null hypothesis of no difference of means with a 95% CI, was assessed with two-tail bootstrapping with Bonferroni correction. Triple asterisks indicate p << 0.0001.