AI detects abnormalities that cause epileptic seizures

The Multicentre Epilepsy Lesion Detection project (MELD) used over 1,000 patient MRI scans from 22 global epilepsy centres to develop the algorithm, which provides reports of where abnormalities are in cases of drug-resistant focal cortical dysplasia (FCD), which is a leading cause of epilepsy. The team’s findings are published in Brain.

FCDs are areas of the brain that have developed abnormally and often cause drug-resistant epilepsy. It is typically treated with surgery but identifying the lesions from an MRI scan is an ongoing challenge for clinicians as FCDs can look normal.

In a statement, co-senior author, Dr Sophie Adler, UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, said: “We hope that this technology will help to identify epilepsy-causing abnormalities that are currently being missed. Ultimately it could enable more people with epilepsy to have potentially curative brain surgery.”

To develop the algorithm, the team quantified cortical features from the MRI scans, such as how thick or folded the cortex/brain surface was and used around 300,000 locations across the brain.