February 19, 2021

New EBRAINS-Enabled Tool to Help Guide Surgery in Drug-Resistant Epilepsy Patients

Summary, originally published on EIN Newswire

Scientists of the Human Brain Project have developed a computational tool to locate the areas in a patient’s brain where epilepsy seizures emerge. Now, the team is using EBRAINS to further boost the accuracy with high resolution brain atlas data. With a clinical trial ongoing, the approach aims to give surgeons an increasingly powerful and precise tool to support targeted surgery decisions for each patient.

“Surgery success depends on locating these areas as precisely as possible. But in clinical practice this often proves very difficult, and the average surgery success rate remains at only around 60%”, says Viktor Jirsa. Any improvement would have major impact for many patients.”

The scientist has developed a computational tool, called “The Virtual Brain” (TVB), to model and predict activity in an individual patient brain. In collaboration with the neurologist Fabrice Bartolomei, they adapted the model to epilepsy, simulating the spread of individual seizure activity. The model thus can become an additional advisory tool for neurosurgeons to help target surgeries more precisely.

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