Ultrahigh Field MRI
Sponsor: NIH-NIBIB (P30 NS076408, P41 EB015894)
Project Description: Increased signal noise performance of 7 Tesla MRI, compared with standard clinical MRI, can be translated into improved spatial resolution and improved tissue contrast. These improvements may support increased sensitivity and specificity of lesion detection and characterization in epilepsy, where current clinical imaging techniques have not diagnosed all relevant cerebral lesions. Many patients with epilepsy have normal brain MRI with current imaging protocols. This research protocol will address questions of whether 7T MRI can detect lesions in epilepsy patients whose clinical 3T MRI was normal, and whether patients who have lesions detected with clinical MRI will be shown to be more extensive lesions with 7T MRI or lesion characteristics that are better characterized with 7T MRI.
Initial findings of this ongoing study were reported in the journal Radiology (Henry TR, Chupin M, Lehéricy S, Strupp JP, Sikora MA, Sha ZY, Ugurbil K, Van de Moortele P-F. Hippocampal sclerosis in temporal lobe epilepsy: findings at 7 Tesla. Radiology 261: 199-209, 2011).
Intracranial and Extracranial EEG
Sponsor: IRB-approved, financial support pending
Project Description: Intracranial EEG (IC-EEG) monitoring is used clinically to determine sites of ictal onset for planning epilepsy surgery. Compared with extracranial EEG (EC-EEG), recent research has shown that IC-EEG data offer greater opportunities for seizure detection and prediction. In particular, only IC-EEG can record very fast-frequency oscillations (“ripples” at 80-250 HZ, and “fast ripples” at 250-500 Hz), may detect seizure onset earlier and perhaps more definitively. Our study objectives include:
- To develop automated techniques for linear analysis of frequency, amplitude and topography in IC-EEG data
- To develop automated techniques for non-linear analysis of spatiotemporal properties in IC-EEG data
- To use these descriptive observations for hypothesis generation and, possibly, for future clinical applications in evaluation for epilepsy surgery