Stopping Epileptic Seizures With Fewer False Alarms

Epilepsy affects 50 million people worldwide, but in a third of these cases, medication cannot keep seizures from occurring. One solution is to shoot a short pulse of electricity to the brain to stamp out the seizure just as it begins to erupt. But brain implants designed to do this have run into a stubborn problem - too many false alarms, triggering unneeded treatment. To solve this, a Johns Hopkins biomedical engineer has devised new seizure detection software that, in early testing, significantly cuts the number of unneeded pulses of current an epilepsy patient would receive.

Transcript

00:00:09 svi Sarma an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University is trying to improve new technology designed to detect and stop seizures in patients with epilepsy which affects 50 million people worldwide of those epilepsy patients about 30% both children and adults are what are called drug resistant they don't respond very well to medications and for these people

00:00:33 the only alternative today is surgery Professor sarma's team including postal fellow satino Santino has devised new software that in early tests detected the onset of seizures while setting off fewer false alarms that would trigger unneeded treatment this implant has three components one is the electrodes that sit on top or inside the brain the second piece is a neural stimulator

00:00:59 which is the battery pack connected to a wire that innervates specific electrodes and then there's a sensing piece that decides when a seizure is about to happen and that switches on the current the current stimulates a very targeted region of the brain to suppress the seizures basically we're interested in just treating only when necessary and for that you really need to reduce the

00:01:21 false positives my lab has focused on developing a technology that builds that intelligent decision maker to minimize the false alarms as as well as minimize delays between when we detect a seizure and when it actually happens Dr Gregory Bergie director of the John's Hopkins Epilepsy Center is working with Professor Sarma to address a key question how can we enhance the accuracy

00:01:44 of anti-seizure devices when I think of an electrical engineer I think of somebody that would be very uh would be ideal for addressing this question in that they not only understand the theory but they're used to a translational approach where they can take that theory and directly apply it and so coming from electrical engineering background I think Professor Sarma is ideally suited

00:02:05 to be asking these questions our Dream goal is to develop a technology that's so accurate that patient seizures are suppressed 100% of the time so that they can live normal lives