• Riëm El Tahry, Martin Hirsch, Kenou Van Rijckevorsel, Susana Ferrao Santos, Marianne de Tourtchaninoff, Herbert Rooijakkers, Volker Coenen, and Andreas Schulze-Bonhage.
• Department of Neurology, Centre for Refractory Epilepsy, Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc, Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium.
• Epileptic Disord. 2016 Jun 1; 18 (2): 155-62.

AbstractMany epilepsy patients treated with vagus nerve stimulation additionally use an "on-demand" function, triggering an extra stimulation to terminate a seizure or diminish its severity. Nevertheless, a substantial number of patients are not able to actively trigger stimulations by use of a magnet, due to the absence of an aura or inability for voluntary actions in the early phase of a seizure. To address this need, a novel implantable pulse generator, the AspireSR VNS system, was developed to provide automated ictal stimulation triggered by a seizure-detecting algorithm. We report our experience with three patients in assessing the functionality of ictal stimulation, illustrating the detection system in practice. Detection of ictal tachycardia and variable additional detections of physiological tachycardia depended on the individual seizure-detecting algorithm settings.

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