The Intelligent Systems for Medicine Laboratory at the University of Western Australia has entered a research collaboration agreement with Computational Radiology Laboratory of Boston Children’s Hospital to develop a surgical-simulation based approach to epilepsy treatment. The project will demonstrate the benefit of this new approach for accurately identifying the placement of surgically implanted invasive electrode arrays and epileptic seizure onset zones identified by them, relative to brain anatomy. The technique employs a unique non-linear biomechanical model of the brain and has the potential to dramatically increase the number of epilepsy patients benefiting from precisely targeted surgery – the only curative treatment for epilepsy.

3D magnetic resonance image presented as a tri-planar cross-section. Public domain software 3DSlicer, developed by collaborators at Harvard and MIT, was used to generate the image.