Michael Maroun Zeineh1, Josef Parvizi1, Priti Balchandani1, Chunlei Liu1, Gary Glover1, Anne Sawyer1, Robert Fisher1, Scott William Atlas1
1Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA
Ultra-high field human brain imaging holds the promise to visualize with great precision the biological substrates of medial temporal lobe (MTL) epilepsy. We performed 7.0T MRI brain scanning on 6 volunteers with medial temporal lobe epilepsy who had concurrent 1.5T or 3.0T MRIs. Compared to the lower field imaging, the 7.0T images demonstrated superior visualization of both the microscopic anatomy of the normal contralateral medial temporal lobe as well as atrophy of hippocampal cell fields in the abnormal hemisphere. High-field imaging has the potential to characterize and detect microscopic pathology associated with MTL epilepsy.