Clinical Research Directory

OPM MEG in Pre-surgical Mapping for Patients With Epilepsy

Magnetoencephalography, or "MEG", is a brain-scanning method which has been available for many years. It is used in the UK and worldwide to help patients with epilepsy, who need surgery to resolve their seizures. The MEG scan can help inform the surgeon about where to operate, by mapping the abnormal brain activity caused by epilepsy. During a traditional MEG recording, patients sit very still with their head in a rigid helmet which houses many tiny sensors. This can be uncomfortable, and there are additional problems if the patient is a child, because the helmet is often too big. It is not possible to record useful data from the very youngest children with a traditional MEG scanner. But there is a new generation of MEG systems, called OPM-MEG, which employ lightweight sensors housed in a kind of hat. The hat can be appropriately sized for children, and the patient can move comfortably. The new systems are also more cost-effective to run. It is important to know whether the accepted clinical protocols for using MEG in planning epilepsy surgery can be directly transferred to OPM-MEG. It is also important to understand how the patient experience compares across systems. In this project, 20 volunteer patients will be recruited from among those children already having routine pre-surgical MEG recordings Aston University. They will be invited to participate in an OPM-MEG recording in the same facility at Aston University, so that data from the new OPM-MEG device can be compared with the data from the old MEG scanner. Data analysis pipelines will be streamlined, and the accuracy of the results compared to determine whether the improved sensor arrangement for children in the OPM-MEG system leads to better localisation of epileptiform activity.