Importance: Cortical stimulation is used during presurgical epilepsy evaluation for functional mapping and for defining the cortical area responsible for seizure generation. Despite wide use of cortical stimulation, the association between cortical stimulation–induced seizures and surgical outcome remains unknown.
Objective: To assess whether the removal of the seizure-onset zone resulting from cortical stimulation is associated with a good surgical outcome.
Design, Setting, and Participants: This cohort study used data from 2 tertiary epilepsy centers: Montreal Neurological Institute in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and Grenoble Alpes University Hospital in Grenoble, France. Participants included consecutive patients (n = 103) with focal drug-resistant epilepsy who underwent stereoelectroencephalography between January 1, 2007, and January 1, 2017. Participant selection criteria were cortical stimulation during implantation, subsequent open surgical procedure with a follow-up of 1 or more years, and complete neuroimaging data sets for superimposition between intracranial electrodes and the resection.
Main Outcomes and Measures: Cortical stimulation–induced typical electroclinical seizures, the volume of the surgical resection, and the percentage of resected electrode contacts inducing a seizure or encompassing the cortical stimulation–informed and spontaneous seizure-onset zones were identified. These measures were correlated with good (Engel class I) and poor (Engel classes II-IV) surgical outcomes. Electroclinical characteristics associated with cortical stimulation–induced seizures were analyzed.
Conclusions and Relevance: Seizure induction by cortical stimulation appears to identify the epileptic generator as reliably as spontaneous seizures do; this finding might lead to a more time-efficient intracranial presurgical investigation of focal epilepsy as the need to record spontaneous seizures is reduced.