The First International Collaborative Workshop on Seizure Prediction: summary and data description

The First International Collaborative Workshop on Seizure Prediction was held at the Department of Epileptology, University of Bonn, in Bonn, Germany on April 24-28, 2002. Organized by the Universities of Pennsylvania and Bonn, and funded by grants from the American Epilepsy Society, the German Section of the International League against Epilepsy, and the German Section of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology, the workshop was attended by 51 researchers from 16 centers in seven countries. There were four major goals for the workshop: (1) to host a one-day didactic session on the science of seizure prediction, with lectures by leaders in the field; (2) to assess the current state of the field by applying current methods used to predict seizures to a shared set of continuous intracranial EEG data and discussing the strengths and weaknesses of each approach; (3) to establish a consensus on minimal data requirements, a common nomenclature, and objective methods for comparing system performance across platforms and laboratories for seizure prediction research; and most importantly (4) to establish a multi-laboratory, international working group dedicated to understanding seizure generation and making on-line, prospective seizure prediction a reality. Following the didactic course, each participating group presented their results, after applying their seizure prediction methods to five common data sets agreed upon in advance and distributed before the meeting. What follows is a description of the shared data set used for analysis, a summary of the major discussion points from the workshop, and points of consensus among the group. The brief discussion serves as a common introduction to the research papers that follow in this issue, and the description of the shared data is referenced in each of these papers. Participants in the workshop are listed at the end of the Conclusions section, in alphabetical order.