Epilepsy is a chronic and prevalent disease. When epilepsy is drug resistant, resection of epileptogenic abnormalities may control seizures. However, there exist focal epileptogenic abnormalities which are not well visualized by current imaging techniques. Hippocampal vascularity has yet to be explored as an in vivo marker for the epileptic brain. Using susceptibility weighted imaging at 7T MRI we are able to visualize vessels in the hippocampus, and have automatically segmented the vessels in the hippocampus of 19 patients with temporal lobe epilepsy and 19 healthy controls. We found significant asymmetry in the vessel density in patients with epilepsy when compared against healthy controls.
This abstract and the presentation materials are available to members only; a login is required.