The American Epilepsy Society (AES) has awarded a $15,000 seed grant for a collaborative project to be conducted by Dr. Theodore Schwartz and his Weill Cornell epilepsy research team and Huabei Jiang, Ph.D., of the University of Florida. The grant is for “Mapping Ictal Discharges Using Photoacoustic Tomography,” which will develop hardware and software for a photoacoustic tomography device that can map an epileptic focus and improve outcomes in epilepsy surgery.
The goal of epilepsy surgery is resect, disconnect, or stimulate the area of the brain where seizures initiate, with the result of eliminating or greatly reducing seizures. A critical step before the surgery is identifying the ictal onset zone. The emerging technology of photoacoustic tomography (PAT) combines ultrasonic and electromagnetic waves to produce remarkably detailed 3D images using non-ionizing radiation; the team believes that PAT can be used to improve brain mapping and lead to more effective surgery.
The AES seed grant will fund a collaboration between the labs at Weill Cornell and the University of Florida, which bring complementary strengths to the project. Dr. Jiang’s biomedical engineering lab will design and test the device, and Dr. Schwartz’s epilepsy research lab will perform the PAT mapping and LFP recording.
