Modeling plasticity during epileptogenesis by long short term memory neural networks

Understanding the pathogenesis of epilepsy including changes in synaptic pathways can improve our knowledge about epilepsy and development of new treatments. In this regard, data-driven models such as artificial neural networks, which are able to capture the effects of synaptic plasticity, can play an important role. This paper proposes long short term memory (LSTM) as the ideal architecture for modeling plasticity changes, and validates this proposal via experimental data. As a special class of recurrent neural networks (RNNs), LSTM is able to track information through time and control its flow via several gating mechanisms, which allow for maintaining the relevant and forgetting the irrelevant information. In our experiments, potentiation and depotentiation of motor circuit and perforant pathway as two forms of plasticity were respectively induced by kindled and kindled + transcranial magnetic stimulation of animal groups. In kindling, both procedure duration and gradual synaptic changes play critical roles. The stimulation of both groups continued for six days. Both after-discharge (AD) and seizure behavior as two biologically measurable effects of plasticity were recorded immediately post each stimulation. Three classes of artificial neural networks—LSTM, RNN, and feedforward neural network (FFNN)—were trained to predict AD and seizure behavior as indicators of plasticity during these six days. Results obtained from the collected data confirm the superiority of LSTM. For seizure behavior, the prediction accuracies achieved by these three models were 0.91 ± 0.01, 0.77 ± 0.02, and 0.59 ± 0.02%, respectively, and for AD, the prediction accuracies were 0.82 ± 0.01, 0.74 ± 0.08 and 0.42 ± 0.1, respectively.