Momentous milestone: Cook Children’s Neurosciences Research Center celebrates first U.S. patent

The Neurosciences Research Center at Cook Children’s earned it’s first-ever U.S. patent for a 3D-printed head replica. The patent describes the design, fabrication and testing of a construction that resembles the electromagnetic properties of a human pediatric head. This construction realistically replicates the morphology and electrical properties (i.e., conductivities of different head tissues) of a real pediatric human head and includes implanted sources embedded in deep brain structures, which has the potential of generating realistic epileptic brain activity.

Noninvasive electrophysiological techniques have significantly enhanced our ability to detect and localize human brain neural activity. This capability has a significant clinical impact in the presurgical evaluation of patients with drug-resistant epilepsy since it allows the noninvasive localization of the brain area that generates seizures. Precise localization of this brain area is critical since it may reduce the need for invasive procedures or optimize their planning in complex clinical cases. More importantly, surgical resection of this brain area will render children with drug-resistant epilepsy free of seizures.

Unfortunately, the precision and accuracy with which these techniques localize the epileptic activity is unknown and the selection of which method is the most suitable to localize this activity is challenging. The 3D-printed phantom will help us make robust assessments regarding the localization accuracy of these methods. It also will guide improvements on developing new methods and techniques that can accurately localize the epileptogenic activity in children with drug-resistant epilepsy.