Wafaa Zaaraoui1,
Caroline Rey1, Fabrice Bartolomei2, 3,
Patrick Chauvel2, 3, Elisabeth Soulier1,
Sylviane Confort-Gouny1, Patrick J. Cozzone, Lothar R. Schad4,
Jean-Philippe Ranjeva1, Maxime Guye1, 5
1CRMBM,
UMR 7339, CNRS, Aix-Marseille Universit, Marseille, France; 2Ple
de Neurosciences Cliniques, APHM, Marseille, France; 3Laboratoire
de Neurophysiologie et Neuropsychologie, U751, INSERM, Aix-Marseille Universit,
Marseille, France; 4Computer Assisted Clinical Medicine,
Heidelberg University, Mannheim, Germany; 5Ple dImagerie
Mdicale, APHM, Marseille, France
Patients suffering from pharmacoresistant partial epilepsy are potential candidates for epilepsy surgery consisting of removal of the epileptogenic zone (EZ). Localization of the EZ during presurgical assessment is a crucial issue and requires invasive intracranial EEG recordings. Therefore, developments of new non-invasive localizing methods are of particular interest. We demonstrated for the first time that abnormal accumulation of sodium concentrations succeeded to lateralize epilepsy and that sodium concentrations in the grey matter of patients are correlated with the interictal electrical abnormalities in regions of the epileptogenic zone. Brain sodium MRI appears as a promising non-invasive presurgical tool in drug-resistant epilepsy.