Stories about: Joseph Madsen

Robot-enhanced neurosurgery for nimbler seizure mapping

Posted on by Jessica Cerretani
Posted in Devices, Innovation, Market trends
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implanting electrodes for seizure monitoring, with robotic assistance
Scellig Stone and Joseph Madsen in surgery with the robot.

Head shaved, a little boy rests on the operating table, deep under anesthesia. His parents have brought him to Boston Children’s Hospital in hopes of determining the cause of his seizures. Now, neurosurgeons Scellig Stone, MD, PhD, Joseph Madsen, MD, and their colleagues in the Epilepsy Center are performing a procedure designed to monitor seizure activity in the 3-year-old’s brain.

But as the team members crowd around the table, they’re not alone. With the push of a button, a large robotic arm rotates and lowers right next to the boy’s head, helping the physicians pinpoint the precise location to drill. “This is a real game-changer,” murmurs one of the clinicians observing the surgery. “It’s going to transform the way we practice.” …

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Looking between seizures to map seizures’ origins

Posted on by Nancy Fliesler
Posted in Information technology, Innovation, Science
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seizure mapping

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.  …

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