Re-entry of travelling excitation loops is a long-suspected driver of human seizures, yet how such loops arise in patient brain networks -- and how susceptible they are to targeted disruption -- remains unclear. We reconstruct a millimetre-scale virtual brain from diffusion MRI of a drug-resistant epilepsy patient, embed excitable Epileptor neural fields, and show that realistic cortico-cortical delays are sufficient to generate self-sustaining re-entry. Systematic parameter sweeps reveal a narrow delay-coupling window that predicts oscillation frequency and seizure duration across 184 recorded seizures. Precisely timed biphasic stimuli or sub-millimetre virtual lesions abort re-entry in silico, yielding phase-dependent termination rules validated in intracranial recordings. Our framework exposes delay-constrained re-entry as a generic dynamical mechanism for large-scale brain synchrony and provides a patient-specific testbed for precision neuromodulation and minimally invasive disconnection.
@article{arxiv.2508.04824,
title = {Delay-constrained re-entry governs large-scale brain seizures and other network pathologies},
author = {Paul Triebkorn and Huifang E. Wang and Marmaduke Woodman and Maxime Guye and Fabrice Bartolomei and Viktor Jirsa},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.04824},
year = {2025}
}