Best Life: New seven tesla MRI targets epilepsy

CLEVELAND, Ohio (Ivanhoe Newswire) – Almost three and a half million people suffer from epilepsy a disorder of the brain that can cause seizures.

For some, these seizures can be controlled with medication, others will need brain surgery, which can be risky. But now, new technology is helping doctors pinpoint what’s causing the seizures better than ever before.

Gabriela “Gabi” Sable first started experiencing signs of epilepsy when she was just 11 years old not long after, seizures started.

“People’s parents went to the school and told the school that they didn’t want me to hang out with their kids,” said Gabi.

Multiple hospitalizations and MRIs could not pinpoint what was causing the seizure.

“Some patients have very small malformations that we cannot see,” said Elia Pestan Knight, MD Pediatric epileptologist at the Cleveland Clinic Epilepsy Center.

Dr. Pestana Knight knew Gabi’s lesion was in her frontal lobe, but it was too tiny to know exactly where.

“We can, simply, not remove the whole frontal lobe. Those are her dominant lobes for her language and for her ability to write and comprehend the spoken language,” Dr. Pestana Knight explains.

The most common MRI used for diagnosis is something called the 3 Tesla – that’s the size of the magnet. But now, there’s a more powerful 7 Tesla MRI, which was able to determine exactly where Gabi’s lesion was.

“That lesion was far away from the areas of her speech,” said Dr. Pestana Knight.

Dr. Pestana Knight was able to perform a robotic laser ablation therapy to remove the lesion, and now, Gabi is seizure-free and doing all the things she was never able to do before, including hiking Peru’s Machu Picchu.

Gabi was part of a clinical trial on the seven Tesla MRIs.

It has now been approved by the FDA and is expected to help hundreds of thousands of people suffering from hard-to-detect lesions that cause epilepsy.

Contributors to this news report include: Marsha Lewis, Producer; Kirk Manson, Videographer; Roque Correa, Editor.

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