CREMEDICAL CORP — Department of Health and Human Services SBIR Phase I: 106

Description

PROJECT SUMMARY Resective neurosurgery is essential for treating a range of neurologic conditions such as epilepsy and brain tumorsFor some patientswhose lesion is close to cortical language areaspostoperative expressive or receptive language deficit is a major and feared postoperative complicationMuch effort is devoted to identifying the cortical language regionsand relating such localization to the patient s lesionNoninvasive mapping of cortical language functionespecially for the vulnerable patient population who cannot tolerate awake craniotomyfMRI or TMSis an important unmet needThe investigatorslong term objective is to develop an inexpensiveconvenienthigh resolution scalp tripolar electroencephalographytEEGrecording system and algorithms used to localize and map cortical functiontEEG will provide an adjunctivenoninvasive approach to surgical mapping proceduresfMRI and TMS that may not be available for children and other patient populationsNovel scalp tEEG suppresses physiologic electrical artifacts related to patient movement and cranial musclesand artifacts related to other extraneous electrical signals to enable recording of very focal brain signals with high fidelitywhich is critical for functional cortical mappingtEEG localizes gamma activity with spatial resolution similar to that of ECoGthus providing a quality of extracranial recording that approximates intracranial EEGDenser tEEGas proposedwill further increase the spatial resolutionThe Phase I objective is to test the feasibility of using novel tEEG scalp recording for noninvasive functional transcranial anatomic lateralization of dominant language hemisphere and localization of cortical expressive and receptive language regions in pediatric patients with epilepsyThe following specific aims are designed to achieve the Phase I objectiveAimAdapt the tEEG platform to a form that is suitable for fastreliableand higher spatial application in the clinical testingSignal fidelity will be analyzed to ensure the system s efficacy and fitAimRecord scalp tEEG during a linguistic naming task in pediatric patients with epilepsyand test whether regions of significant event related gamma activity correspond to the dominant language hemisphere and the receptivetemporo parietalor expressivefrontalareas during the appropriate phases of the taskThe patients will have already undergone language mapping by traditional approaches and will be verified to the language regions identified by tEEG PROJECT NARRATIVE tEEG scalp recording system and algorithms may provide an inexpensiveconvenientand noninvasive tool for functional cortical mappingwithout the complexities and risk of cranial surgery or intracranial recordingand without the expense of fMRI or TMS