Bijoy Kundu, PhD, (left) and Mark Quigg, MD
Bijoy Kundu, PhD, and Mark Quigg, MD, received a $100,000 grant on March 13 from the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation to improve imaging technology for epilepsy patients.
Epilepsy affects 1.6 percent of the US population, but 30-40 percent of those seizures are not adequately controlled by medicine. For patients with drug-resistant epilepsy, it’s recommended to identify the seizure onset zone within the brain in order to perform surgery. But finding these targets can be difficult and invasive.
It’s the reason behind the work of Dr. Kundu, associate professor in the Department of Radiology and Medical Imaging, and Dr. Quigg, a professor in the Department of Neurology. They aim to develop an AI-powered method known as interictal Dynamic PET, or iD-PET, to locate seizure onset zones within patients and assist a successful surgical approach.
“The iD-PET technique will change clinical practice,” said Dr. Kundu. “Rather than mapping the uptake and metabolism of glucose in the brain in a static fashion, it maps the rate of glucose uptake, metabolism, and decay. We expect this more sensitive imaging technique to increase the proportion of patients with identifiable ‘PET-positive’ lesions to allow more patients to undergo transformative epilepsy surgery.”
The lab will use the funding of the Commonwealth Commercialization Fund grant to recruit more healthy control patients, streamline software, and work towards developing an easy-to-use, accessible toolkit.
Filed Under: Research