
When epilepsy can’t be controlled with drugs, neurosurgery is sometimes curative, if the seizures are coming from discrete brain tissue that can be safely removed.
Finding these diseased areas, however, can require invasive surgery to place grids of electrodes on the brain’s surface. That’s followed by long-term, 24-hour EEG monitoring — typically for a week — until a seizure happens. Neurosurgeons then use this data to map a surgical path. But to actually remove the diseased tissue, a second operation is needed.
That’s enough to deter many families from epilepsy surgery. But what if seizure origins could be mapped without having to actually observe a seizure?
Joseph Madsen, MD, director of Epilepsy Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital, and Eun-Hyoung Park, PhD, a computational biophysicist in the Department of Neurosurgery, think they have a way to do that — with an algorithm originally used for economic forecasting. …