EPICONNECT · Functional brain networks in epilepsy

Functional brain networks in epilepsy

Approximately 30-40% of patients with epilepsy cannot be adequately treated with anti-epileptic drugs. For these patients, epilepsy surgery is the treatment with highest efficacy to become seizure-free. The goal of the epilepsy surgery is to resect or disconnect the brain region that is causing the patient to have seizures, the so called epileptic focus. The pre-surgical evaluation answers the question whether a patient will benefit from epilepsy surgery or not. Therefore, the patient undergoes a battery of test to localize the epileptic focus and to find overlap with eloquent cortex. The two cornerstone investigations are electroencephalography (EEG) that records the electrical field generated by the brain and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) that images the anatomy of the brain. EEG is used to reveal electrical epileptic phenomena and MRI to detect structural abnormalities. During the video-EEG monitoring, the patient is admitted during 5-7 days in the hospital to record EEG and video simultaneously to study the electrical field and the semiology during seizures. The recorded long-term EEG is visually analyzed by the treating physician. Epileptic spikes and seizures are marked in the EEG to get an estimate about the location of the epileptic focus. Because epilepsy is a network disorder seizures and spikes rapidly spread throughout the brain. This makes the localization of the focus from EEG recordings a challenge. In this project we studied how brain regions communicate with each other during baseline and seizures to identify the region that is causing the epilepsy. The main outcome of the project is that we achieved to localize the region that is generating the epilepsy by studying the functional interactions between the regions with EEG. We optimized the information obtained during the video-EEG monitoring to provide the treating physician with more information about the regions causing the epilepsy in an early phase of the presurgical evaluation. During seizures and interictal epileptiform discharges the epileptic zone could be estimated from the EEG with high localization accuracy. Furthermore, even during resting state the functional brain connectivity obtained by a brief EEG test tells us which regions have been affected mostly in the patient by the epilepsy. This has the potential to ameliorate patient care. Not only could some additional more expensive tests during the presurgical evaluation become redundant, also the patients can be treated more efficiently and earlier in time, allowing faster reintegration into the society and therefore reducing costs for the society.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз