New EBRAINS compatible tool to help guide surgery in patients with drug-resistant epilepsy

Scientists at the Human Brain Project have developed a calculator to locate areas of a patient’s brain where epileptic seizures appear. Now the team is using EBRAINS to further improve accuracy with high-resolution brain atlas data. With an ongoing clinical trial, the approach aims to give surgeons an increasingly powerful and precise tool to support targeted surgical decisions for each patient.

Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders, affecting more than 50 million people worldwide. Patients suffer from seizures caused by sudden neural activity, sometimes involving large networks of the brain. In a third of cases, the disease is resistant to drugs. The most common treatment option for these patients is the surgical removal of the “epileptogenic zone,” the areas of the brain where seizures occur.

“The success of surgery depends on locating these areas as precisely as possible. But in clinical practice this often turns out to be very difficult, and the average success rate for surgery remains only around 60%, ”explains Viktor Jirsa. Any improvement would have a major impact for many patients “.

The scientist developed a computational tool, called “The Virtual Brain” (TVB), to model and predict activity in the brain of an individual patient. In collaboration with neurologist Fabrice Bartolomei, they adapted the model to epilepsy, simulating the spread of individual seizure activity. The model can thus become an additional advisory tool for neurosurgeons to help target surgeries more precisely.

A clinical trial is currently underway to evaluate personalized brain models of TVB as a new tool for planning epilepsy surgery, with promising early results. It is important to stress that the Virtual Brain tool is still at the clinical investigation stage and therefore not yet available to patients.

The team is now working on the next generation of The Virtual Brain, which further improves the accuracy of the model using EBRAINS research infrastructure. The goal is to dramatically increase the potential for personalized brain representation using large brain data sets from EBRAINS Brain Atlas. This includes the most detailed 3-D representation of brain anatomy, the BigBrain, at 20 micron resolution.

“Only EBRAINS can achieve this massive scale and resolution,” Jirsa says. “Here, brain data resources are made compatible and integrated with high performance computing and computing tools. EBRAINS allows the application of deep learning and other methods to find the setup that best matches the patient’s own records of brain dynamics. This is an important step towards a more precise localization of the epileptogenic zone. “

Katrin Amunts, Director of Scientific Research at HBP, says: “HBP’s multidisciplinary approach, which provides neuroscientific information from big data analysis and neuroimaging studies, supported by brain modeling and advanced computing is a very effective way to advance brain research and bring innovation to patients and society. “

Pawel Swieboda, CEO of EBRAINS and Managing Director of HBP, comments: “Professor Jirsa’s virtual brain computing tool is one of many breakthroughs resulting from the cutting edge scientific expertise of scientists at the Human Brain Project and the state of the EBRAINS artistic research infrastructure. We look forward to sharing more brain health advancements with EBRAINS in the future. In the meantime, we invite researchers in different fields, such as neuroscience, neuroengineering or neurotechnology, to name a few, to explore how the EBRAINS platform can improve their own research. ”

Provided by Human Brain Project