Professor Louis Lemieux

Professor Lemieux’s group works in the IoN’s Department of Clinical and Experimental Epilepsy. The group hopes to improve the lives of individuals suffering from severe epilepsy by using a new imaging technique.

Epilepsy is one of the UK’s most common neurological conditions with over 400,000 people affected. Medication is often prescribed, but some people find that their symptoms cannot be adequately controlled through drug treatments and therefore require surgery to eliminate their seizures. Brain Research Trust funding is enabling a new non-invasive technique to be tested for determining the suitability of patients for the procedure.

Tests are carried out prior to surgery to help pinpoint the part of the brain from which seizures originate. In some cases, the location cannot be found even through traditional imaging techniques (MRI) and may require electrodes to be inserted into the brain, which is invasive, expensive and carries health risk.

Instead Professor Lemieux and his team have developed a new scanning technique called EEG-correlated fMRI, which in laboratory studies has provided a new means of finding the origin of seizures.

Thanks to a Brain Research Trust grant, Professor Lemieux’s team have purchased equipment to implement this technique in a clinical setting and record the results of the research.

During 2009-10 and using these new tools, Professor Louis Lemieux started the patient study. The team hope that this new method will reduce the need for invasive tests in future and help increase the likelihood of successful surgery for all patients.

We are most grateful for the support of a number of trusts, including the The James Tudor Foundation, which have enabled Brain Research Trust to fund this equipment and research.