Increasing the yield from volumetric MRI in patients with epilepsy

Volumetric magnetic resonance imaging has become a routine investigation in the management of patients with chronic partial epilepsy. However, even with the use of reformatted images, an underlying cause for epilepsy cannot be found in many of these patients. We show that further processing of the data, including three-dimensional reconstruction and quantitative analysis of the volume and complexity of the images in three dimensions, reveals additional positive information in up to 75% of patients. This may be useful for surgical planning, prognostication, and understanding of the structure and development of the human brain.