Quantitative multi-modal analysis of pediatric focal epilepsy

Abstract

For patients with medically refractive focal epilepsy, surgical intervention to remove the epileptic foci is often the last alternative for permanent cure. The success of such surgery is highly dependent on the doctor's ability to accurately locate the epileptogenic region during the pre-surgical planning and evaluation phase. Hence the goal of this project is to provide an end-to-end quantitative analysis pipeline that fuses an array of imaging modalities including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), diffusion tensor MRI, positron emission tomography (PET), single-photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT) as well as EEG data to build patient-specific head models and to compute prior probability maps of epileptic hotspots for more accurate EEG source localization. By improving the ability to accurately locate these epileptogenic seizure sources, patients can benefit tremendously from accurate surgical resection and consequently have a better chance for complete seizure free recovery.