UIC-2016-108 – Non-invasive method to see human brain epileptic activity

3% of US population is diagnosed with epilepsy and improper or undiagnosed epilepsy is costly to the US healthcare system. Current EEG and MRI/MRS methods cannot see epileptic brain regions reliably or at sufficiently high resolution needed for diagnosis and surgical management of patients with epilepsy. They employ electrical brain wave measurements or EEGs, but are extremely limited due to the extremely low signals generated when recording on the scalp. Moreover, the process of diagnosing of seizures is often a long, expensive and unreliable. UIC and Wayne State inventors developed a method to non-invasively identify regions of the human brain that are epileptic using a specific metabolite expression patterns identified via MRS. Inventors have identified a highly predictive pattern of metabolites from freshly isolated human brain tissues removed at the time of epilepsy surgery that corresponded with brain regions showing high levels of epileptic activity in vivo, based on long term intracranial recordings. Both histological and genomic validations show that this method can identify abnormal epileptic brain regions Hyunjin Kim hkim227@otm.uic.edu 312355-7843