Brain Atrophy Following Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Surgery

Introduction Current understanding of the secondary effects of brain surgery, both conventional and irradiative, is largely limited to clinical observations. Studies of post-operative imaging data have mainly concentrated on brain atrophy following radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy [ 1,2]. We have investigated the effect of conventional surgery on the unresected brain tissue based on the comparison of MR images acquired pmand post-operatively in subjects with a history of mesiotemporal epilepsy. Matching of the preand post-op scans allows improved visualization of the morphological changes resulting from surgery, as shown in figure 1. This example illustrates an enlargement