Lecture by Sridevi Sarma, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

ABOUT THIS LECTURE

In this talk, the speaker will describe a product, EZTrack, which uses personalized brain network models estimated from EEG data to accurately localize where seizures start in the brain - the epileptogenic zone (EZ). Medications can suppress the EZ, however, over 30% of epilepsy patients are drug-resistant and account for 80% of the total costs to treat epilepsy. For these patients, clinicians can surgically remove the EZ to stop seizures altogether, or electrically stimulate the EZ to suppress seizures. Unfortunately, treatment outcomes average 50% success. The problem is that EZ can be very difficult to find. In clear cases, a lesion can be found on an MRI scan and the EZ is determined to be in the vicinity of the lesion. In over 50% of cases, however, MRI scans look normal, forcing clinicians to localize the EZ by recording EEG activity from several brain regions in the patient. A team of clinicians then visually inspect streams of EEG data both on the scalp and inside the brain to localize the EZ. EZTrack is an analysis package that processes EEG data in minutes and delivers heat maps that highlight regions highly correlated to the EZ. EZTrack has been validated on a retrospective study consisting of 75 patients and 366 seizure events and demonstrated an increase of 20% over clinicians in predicting treatment outcomes. Importantly, had clinicians been using EZTrack, they would have been warned about misdiagnosis of the EZ and/or misplacement of electrodes and could have changed their treatment plan.

 

The Academic Lectures are a series of lectures featuring a range of in-Kingdom and international entrepreneurs, academics and distinguished guest speakers.

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