Epilepsy: a simulator to better understand it

August 26, 2016.

Researchers from the CNRS, INSERM, the University of Aix-Marseille and the AP-Hospitals of Marseille have just developed an epilepsy simulator, capable of reproducing what is happening in the brain of ‘a sick person during a seizure.

1% of the world’s population suffers from epilepsy

When we know that 1% of the world’s population suffers from epilepsy, sometimes without knowing it (the first seizures can occur late, even after forty years), we understand the interest of this simulator of a somewhat special kind.

The virtual brain designed by these teams of researchers not only simulates the functioning of the brain of a patient during a crisis, but also, and this is what makes all its interest in the short term, that of a patient in particular, by introducing the patient’s physical and physiological parameters into the computer model!

The virtual brain makes it possible to develop treatment protocols

The idea is to be able to study the patient’s brain at length during a crisis, but using its digital double, in order to adapt the therapies to each patient! The model is in fact capable of simulating the theoretical reaction of the patient to the absorption of the molecules used to combat the effects of epilepsy, using for this the data recorded on hundreds of patients during the treatment.

And in the event that the patient does not respond, or no longer, to the drugs, neurologists can then study the virtual brain, to think about other possible strategies., like surgery … The virtual brain being supposed to reproduce, again, the reactions of the brain of its real double, after a surgical intervention.

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