Abstract
P>Purpose: To evaluate the significance of lateralization of ictal upper limb automatisms in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Methods: Ictal upper limb automatisms of 28 patients with temporal lobe epilepsy were quantified. Duration of automatisms in relation to total seizure duration, movement speed, extent, length, and predominant frequencies of the movements were analyzed for both upper extremities separately and compared to the lateralization of the epileptogenic temporal lobe. Results: Predominantly ipsilateral upper limb automatisms were more common (n = 19) than predominantly contralateral automatisms (n = 9). The duration of ictal ipsilateral upper limb automatisms was significantly longer than the duration of contralateral automatisms (ipsilateral automatisms: 29 of 86 s total seizure duration; contralateral automatisms: 19 of 110 s total seizure duration; p = 0.048). Patients with ipsilateral upper limb automatisms had more often exclusively unitemporal interictal epileptiform discharges (IEDs) (84.2%) than patients with contralateral automatisms (11.1%; p < 0.001). The positive predictive value (PPV) of the combination of these parameters is 84.2%. Excellent surgical seizure outcome was better in patients with ipsilateral upper limb automatisms (77.8%) compared to those with contralateral automatisms (20%) (p = 0.09). The quantitative analysis of movement extent, average speed, maximum speed, and repetition rate of ipsilateral and contralateral upper limb automatisms did not show any statistically significant difference in this patient sample. Conclusion: The lateralization of upper limb automatisms in TLE has a good lateralizing value if the lateralization of IEDs were also taken into consideration.

Abstract
Objective: In human speech, the changes in intonation, rhythm, or stress reflect emotions or intentions and are called prosody. Dysprosody is the impairment of prosody and has been described in stroke and neurodegenerative disorders. Reports in epilepsy patients are limited to case reports. Methods: We assessed prosody qualitatively and quantitatively in 967 focal epilepsy patients. The qualitative assessment was performed by 2 native German speakers, and the quantitative frequency analysis used linguistic software tools. For the quantitative analysis, the formant F0 (a frequency peak, which is an approximation of pitch) and the further spectral frequency peaks of our patients' voices were analyzed. Results: We found 26 patients with ictal dysprosody through qualitative analysis (2.7% of all focal epilepsies). The qualitative changes affected mostly the pitch and the loss of melody. The seizure patterns at the time of ictal dysprosody were always in the nondominant hemisphere (100%) and were mostly right temporal (n = 22; 84.6%). Quantitative analysis of 15 audio samples (11 patients) showed a change in the frequency of formant F0 of several patients and a reduction of frequency variation during ictal speech, expressed as the SD of formant F0 (ictal 14.1 vs interictal 27.2). Conclusions: Ictal dysprosody localizes seizure onset or propagation to the nondominant temporal lobe. This information can be used in the evaluation of patients considered for resective epilepsy surgery. Neurology (R) 2011; 77: 1482-1486

Abstract
Hospital information infrastructures integrate today complex mosaics of heterogeneous systems, often dependent on legacy systems. The integration of disparate information sources in healthcare is an essential effort since physicians, and other hospital personnel, use to analyze and combine data provided by different sources distributed along the hospital facilities. Day-after-day their needs for effective means and tools to support such integration of data increase significantly. In order to fulfill such requirements we designed and developed an extensible multi-agent system that physicians may use to access multiple medical data sources available at the hospital, in a transparent way. This paper presents an overall description of the system giving special attention to its architecture and community of software agents. The agents were specially planned for clinical information gathering, cleaning, integration and presentation in healthcare environments.

Abstract
The design and testing of a "dry" active electrode for electroencephalographic recording is described. A comparative study between the EEG signals recorded in human volunteers simultaneously with the classical Ag-AgCl and "dry" active electrodes was carried out and the reported preliminary results are consistent with a better performance of these devices over the conventional Ag-AgCl electrodes.

Abstract
It is common that epileptic seizures induce uncoordinated movement in a patient's body. This movement is a relevant clinical factor in seizure identification. Nevertheless, quantification of this information has not been an object of much attention from the scientific community. In this paper, we present our effort in developing a new approach to the quantification of movement patterns in patients during epileptic seizures. We attach markers at landmark points of a patient's body and use a camera and a commercial video-electroencephalogram (EEG) system to synchronously register EEG and video during seizures. Then, we apply image-processing techniques to analyze the video frames and extract the trajectories of those points that represent the course of the quantified movement of different body parts. This information may help clinicians in seizure classification. We describe the framework of our system and a method of analyzing video in order to achieve the proposed goal. Our experimental results show that our method can reflect quantified motion patterns of epileptic seizures, which cannot be accessed by means of traditional visual inspection of video recordings. We were able, for the first time, to quantify the movement of different parts of a convulsive human body in the course of an epileptic seizure. This result represents an enhanced value to clinicians in studying seizures for reaching a diagnosis.

Abstract
In this paper, we describe the design, implementation and testing of a dry active flexible electrode with a novel interface material for wearable biosignal recording. The new interface material takes the form of a gel and is highly bendable and comfortable on the wearer's skin. A comparison between common Ag/AgCl and our dry active electrode was performed on seven healthy volunteers. The presented prototype was designed for ECG signals but this technology can be modified for other biosignals. Our results show that the new dry active electrode presents better electrical characteristics than the common Ag/AgCl electrode, namely less power-line interference and better response in the signal band. We can conclude that our novel dry active flexible electrode outperforms the traditional Ag/AgCl wet electrode with the advantages of being dry and comfortable. Some future applications of this biodevice are discussed.