Since its introduction to clinical medicine in the 1980s, MRI has revolutionized many areas of medicine. Epilepsy is no exception. High quality MR imaging of the brain remains an essential pre-requisite to understanding a patient’s epilepsy – why a patient might have epilepsy, where in the brain it…
Welcome to the Division of Epilepsy in the Department of Neurology! We are part of a thriving academic clinical department at the University of Florida College of Medicine that comprises over 45 neurologists involved in patient care, research and teaching. Our group of five full-time faculty members…
The left and right hemispheres of the brain are broadly responsible for different functions, and a Wada test is performed to map out memory and language function in the individual hemispheres. In a sense, Wada is an extension of the neuropsychological evaluation, and aims to determine whether…
MEG measures the magnetic signals from the brain and localizes significant features of the signal on the 3-D brain volume. We aim to have MEG available at UF in the near future, but for now patients requiring MEG are referred to an external facility for the test, and…
Neuropsychology is key to interrogating the cognitive dysfunction that often accompanies long standing focal epilepsy, and tests attention, problem solving, memory, language, IQ, visual-spatial skills, academic skills, and social-emotional functioning. Often, we are able to offer neuropsychology evaluation when patients are admitted for their …
Functional MRI, now a full-fledged clinical service at UF Health, is used to identify ‘eloquent’ cortex in patients in whom there is concern that the seizure focus may be physically close to important brain areas for sensation, motor function or language. Our neuroradiology team employs a full…
A PET scan uses a radionuclide (18fluoro-deoxy-glucose; FDG) to investigate the metabolic profile of the whole brain; areas of focal epilepsy exhibit reduced metabolism that can be visually identified. PET scans can be particularly useful in patients who have no visible MRI lesions to identify epileptogenic brain areas,…
The Epilepsy Patient Management Conference (EMC) is a multidisciplinary weekly meeting when the entire epilepsy team – physicians, surgeons, advanced practice nurses, administrators and coordinators, neuropsychologists and neuroradiologists gather to discuss and synthesize the data gathered for particular patients who have undergone Phase I monitoring. All the relevant…
The Wilder Center for Epilepsy Research hosted a scaled down version of its annual update in a virtual format the week of March 15th, 2021. We were proud to host Dr. Patrick Chauvel (Marseilles, France and University of Pittsburgh), as the 2021 Wilder Visiting Professor of Epilepsy.
The UF comprehensive epilepsy program launched its transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) service in the summer of 2020. As part of only a handful of adult epilepsy centers possessing TMS technology, we are now able to perform ‘mapping’ of language or motor function in an entirely noninvasive way on…
