In the U.S., about one in 100 people have some form of epilepsy. A third of those people have seizures that cannot be controlled with drugs, eventually requiring surgery to remove the area of their brain tissue that is triggering seizure activity.

“If you can identify and surgically remove the entire epileptogenic zone, you will have a patient who is seizure-free,” says Christos Papadelis, PhD, who leads the Boston Children’s Brain Dynamics Laboratory in the Division of Newborn Medicine and is an assistant professor in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

Even experts in this field were skeptical for years about the non-invasive detection of HFOs. But now, thanks to our study and other researchers’ work, these people are changing their minds. At present, however, these surgeries are not always successful. Current diagnostics lack the ability to determine precisely which parts of an individual’s brain are inducing his or her seizures, called the epileptogenic zone. In addition, robust biomarkers for the epileptogenic zone have been poorly established.

But now, a team at Boston Children’s Hospital is doing research to improve pre-surgical pinpointing of the brain’s epileptogenic zone. They are using a newly-established biomarker for epilepsy — fast brain waves called high-frequency oscillations (HFOs) — that can be detected non-invasively using scalp electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). …