Grant: Project Grant

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that affects 1% of Canadians. The main treatment is longterm drug therapy, to which more than 30% of patients are refractory. Fortunately, surgery may be considered in cases of drug resistant epilepsy in which we can define a focal area of the brain responsible for the seizures. The goal of surgery is the resection of brain tissue that generates seizures, without causing functional loss. However, there are no noninvasive techniques able to measure precisely when (on a millisecond time scale) and where (on a millimeter spatial scale) epileptic activity occurs in the brain. Some techniques are dedicated to answer "where" (good spatial resolution) in the brain, whereas others can identify "when" (good temporal resolution). Most neuroimaging techniques have been developed in order to be sensitive to different brain signals: (1) direct measurements of neuronal bioelectric activity (from scalp recordings) and (2) indirect measurement of brain activity through hemodynamic processes providing oxygen to the active neurons and glucose metabolism. The objective of our work is to combine these imaging techniques, to study whether the network organization of brain underlying activity during rest could exhibit some specificity that would allow us to characterize the disease of a patient. Such patient specific characterization should be possible, accounting for only few minutes recordings of resting state activity, even when no transient epileptic discharges could be recorded. We expect these findings to be relevant to investigate new therapeutic approaches for these candidates for epilepsy surgery.