Grant: Operating Grant

Epilepsy affects about 1% of the general population. In many of these patients, seizures cannot be controlled despite the best possible medication. The most common form of such medically intractable epilepsy is temporal lobe epilepsy (originating from a region of the brain called the temporal lobe). Patients unresponsive to medical treatment can be helped by surgery. For surgery to work, however, it is critical to find the area of the brain, i.e. the lesion, which is responsible for the seizures. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays a pivotal role in the evaluation of patients who are candidates for surgery, because it makes it possible to detect lesions. However, in some patients, no lesion is seen on MRI due to their small size. Epilepsy surgery in the absence of a lesion is less successful than when a lesion is found on MRI. The aim of this project is to develop novel MRI techniques that are more powerful to detect very subtle brain lesions. The advanced methods we propose have the potential to make the surgical treatment available to many more patients with severe epilepsy and improve our understanding of the cause of epilepsy.