Multimodal pre-surgical protocol has positive impact on patient outcome in epilepsy

Professor Roy Dudley has been one of our closest collaborators over the past 5+ years. Roy is a pediatric neurosurgeon at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, and an accomplished clinician-scientist investigating both the fundamental underpinnings of epilepsy, and innovative clinical procedures to improve patient outcome.

Roy led this new study published today in Journal of Neurosurgery-Pediatrics in open-access. The data show that this new inter-institutional, multimodal presurgical evaluation protocol is associated with improved seizure freedom for poorly defined cases of focal epilepsy in children. Jeremy Moreau, who trained towards his PhD in our lab, contributed major aspects of the study.

The new systematic protocol, using advanced neuroimaging and electrophysiology tests, was associated with a 1-year postsurgical seizure freedom rate of 91% versus 47% in the preprotocol era. This is a major step forward in improving the care of children with poorly defined focal epilepsy.

We are fortunate to be able to work with such a strong team of clinician-scientists and help them use the best possible tools currently available in the field of neuroimaging and associated data analytics.