Research drives scientific progress. At Johns Hopkins and at institutions across the nation, dedicated scientists are uncovering knowledge and insights that lead to critical and lifesaving treatments and technologies. In the series “Research Matters,” we highlight groundbreaking research and the committed scientists making it happen at Johns Hopkins Biomedical Engineering.
Johns Hopkins biomedical engineer Sri Sarma is developing new technologies to pinpoint the exact origin of seizures in the brain—life-changing work for the roughly 21 million epilepsy patients worldwide whose seizures aren’t relieved by medications.
Removing the specific brain region where seizures originate is the last resort when medication fails. But current clinical tools make precisely locating the epileptogenic zone (EZ) extremely difficult, rendering surgery effective in only about half the cases. With funding from the National Institutes of Health, Sarma and her team help surgeons determine if and where they should operate, improving the success rate of epilepsy surgeries.
“Today, accurately diagnosing epilepsy and then finding an effective treatment can take years to a lifetime,” said Sarma, director of the Neuromedical Control Systems Lab who also serves as vice dean for graduate education at the Whiting School of Engineering. “To fill this gap, we focus on developing computational tools that allow for earlier, precise diagnosis and assist doctors in figuring out the best treatment for each patient.”
Epilepsy is a disorder characterized by sudden recurrent episodes of seizures, or abnormal electrical activity in the brain. Sarma and her team use machine learning and non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG)—a technique that involves attaching electrodes to a patient’s scalp—to capture electrical brain activity related to epileptic seizures. The cornerstone of their work is integrating these findings into diagnostic and surgical planning tools that can be used in the clinic.
Among the innovations developed by Sarma’s lab is the software EZTrack, which creates a heat map of the brain to help doctors identify a patient’s EZ in seconds with high precision. In addition to EZTrack, the team is currently building out EpiScalp, a software tool that provides an accurate epilepsy diagnosis from a single initial EEG recording, significantly cutting down on misdiagnoses that often delay treatment.
“Our work is unique in that this is a new way of mapping epilepsy activity and networks that is personalized to each individual patient’s brain,” Sarma said. “More important, though, is the tremendous potential to guide successful epilepsy surgeries so more patients can live seizure-free.”