Parameter estimation in a whole-brain network model of epilepsy: comparison of parallel global optimization solvers

The Virtual Epileptic Patient (VEP) refers to a computer-based representation of a patient with epilepsy that combines personalized anatomical data with dynamical models of abnormal brain activities. It is capable of generating spatio-temporal seizure patterns that resemble those recorded with invasive methods such as stereoelectro EEG data, allowing for the evaluation of clinical hypotheses before planning surgery. This study highlights the effectiveness of calibrating VEP models using a global optimization approach. The approach utilizes SaCeSS, a cooperative metaheuristic capable of parallel computation, to yield high-quality solutions without requiring excessive computational time. Through extensive benchmarking, our proposal successfully solved a set of different configurations of VEP models, demonstrating better scalability and superior performance against other parallel solvers. These results were further enhanced using a Bayesian optimization framework for hyperparameter tuning, with significant gains in terms of both accuracy and computational cost. Additionally, we added an scalable uncertainty quantification phase after model calibration, and used it to assess the variability in estimated parameters across different problems. Overall, this study has the potential to improve the estimation of pathological brain areas in drug-resistant epilepsy, thereby to inform the clinical decision-making process. Author summaryMotivated by the problem of parameter estimation in a set of whole-brain network models of epilepsy (of increasing complexity), this study addresses the question of choosing a robust global optimization solver that can be accelerated by exploiting parallelism in different infrastructures, from desktop workstations to supercomputers. By leveraging data-driven techniques with robust cooperative global optimization methods, we aim to achieve accurate parameter estimation with reduced reliance on prior information. This is due to the dependency of Bayesian inference on the level of information in the prior, while this approach allows us to quantify uncertainty in the absence of any prior knowledge effectively. In this work, we construct an efficient and accurate method to perform parameter estimation and uncertainty quantification for the VEP model, and we use it to infer the brain regional epileptogenicity from source and sensor level whole-brain data. Of specific interest is the ability of our method to produce inference for high-dimensional state-space models governed by deterministic, stochastic, well-behaved, and stiff differential equations, using only partial observations and sparse encoding from system states to the observation.