[Eligibility criteria for surgery for drug-resistant partial epilepsy in adults]

Eligibility criteria for surgical treatment in drug-resistant partial epilepsy are defined by the clinical and laboratory elements which favored the initiation of often costly and sometimes invasive investigations performed to determine the patient's operability. These criteria, which require a multidisciplinary team including a neurosurgeon, a neurophysiologist and a neurologist, must be distinguished from the operability criteria used by expert centers. Theoretically, eligibility criteria must be validated in terms of both sensitivity (capability to detect good candidates for surgery among the epileptic population) and specificity (exclusion of false candidates). Up to now, such validation of eligibility criteria has been lacking. The present systematic literature review examines the criteria currently used in controlled and multicentric studies, and the criteria which proved to be useful in determining outcome. This last set of criteria is theoretically a good candidate for future validation studies.