Brain Implants for Epileptic Seizures: New Early Warning System Could Lead to Fewer False Alarms, Johns Hopkins University Study

Epilepsy affects 50 million people worldwide, but in a third of these cases, medication cannot keep seizures from occurring. One solution is to shoot a short pulse of electricity to the brain to stamp out the seizure just as it begins to erupt. But brain implants designed to do this have run into a stubborn problem: too many false alarms, triggering unneeded treatment. To solve this, a Johns Hopkins biomedical engineer has devised new seizure detection software that, in early testing, significantly cuts the number of unneeded pulses of current that an epilepsy patient would receive.