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.

Medication is available to treat epilepsy, but some individuals find that their symptoms cannot be adequately controlled through drug treatments and therefore require surgery to eliminate their seizures.

Tests need to be 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 through traditional imaging techniques and may require electrodes to be inserted within the brain, which is invasive, expensive and carries health risk.

However, a new non-invasive scanning technique called EEG-fMRI has been developed by Lemieux and his group at their laboratory at the National Society for Epilepsy in Chalfont St Peter.

EEG-fMRI has been shown in laboratory studies to provide a new means of finding the origin of the seizures. It will now be implemented on patients at the National Hospital of Neurology and Neurosurgery and evaluated to find out how effective it is at localising seizures, reducing the need for invasive tests and helping to increase the likelihood of successful surgery.
In order to carry out this study, the team will first require an MRI-compatible EEG recording system, costing £40,550, which the BRT will be funding.