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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.