Scanning the brain's magnetic fields offers hope for epilepsy patients

Stewart Duguid used to have an epileptic seizure every fortnight. He never knew when they would strike, and they proved impossible to control with medication.

"I had the tonic clonic seizures, the ones where you fall to the ground and shake," the 26-year-old said. "I'd wake up exhausted and need to get my breath back."

However, for the past year he has been living seizure-free after being among the first Australians to have a MEG machine scan his brain's magnetic fields.

Using the machine, doctors were able to pinpoint where the abnormal activity was coming from before surgeons operated last May and removed a section of brain from his frontal cortex.

While he gained a scar above his left ear, the surgery allowed Mr Duguid to return to a life without seizures – something he had not experienced in 13 years.

"I'm able to drive now," he said. "I got back on my Ls."

Being able to drive again means he will have the option of getting his forklift driver's licence as part of his work as a warehouse assistant.

While still on medication, Mr Duguid now just takes his anti-epileptic drugs once a day and has gone from taking five different types of medication to two.

Swinburne University computational neuroscientist David Liley said Mr Duguid was one of more than 50 patients with a drug-resistant type of epilepsy to use a magnetoencephalography scanner, or MEG.

"The new thing here is that Australians have never used a MEG scanner for epilepsy," Professor Liley said.

Up to 12,000 new epilepsy cases are diagnosed each year in Australia, with about 1000 cases considered drug-resistant.

The commercial scanner, at Swinburne University's brain imaging facility, scans the faint magnetic fields of the brain and also records electrical activity.

Professor Liley said for patients such as Mr Duguid with drug-resistant forms of epilepsy, the MEG helped identify the trouble areas so surgery can be better targeted.

"MEG allows you to more quickly and accurately localise the site of abnormal activity, so that patients can go to surgery much faster and get treatment," he said.

Professor Liley estimated there were only 100 MEG scanners in the world and said the one at Swinburne was the only one of its kind in the southern hemisphere.

The machine's rarity is in part due to the high cost of running them – the helium required costs up to $120,000 a year. However Professor Liley said he hoped more patients would be able to access the scanner in the future.

"The ideal is to make it available to clinical patients, which is why we have to go through this research stage first before we can encourage clinicians to use it," Professor Liley said.

The Age