Nuclear Imaging in Epilepsy: Principles and Progress

Abstract

Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders, affecting 0.5%-1.0% of the population. Almost one-third of epilepsy patients do not respond to medical treatment and develop intractable seizures. Nuclear imaging modalities such as ¹⁸F-labeled fluoro-2-deoxyglucose-positron emission tomography (¹⁸F-FDG-PET) and perfusion single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) are useful in the diagnosis and evaluation of epilepsy. The main role of such modalities in clinical epilepsy is focus detection in patients with intractable epilepsy. They enable us to detect the focal lesion as abnormal uptake of nuclear tracers, and are especially useful in MRI-negative patients or those with multiple abnormal regions that are suspected to be epileptogenic. However, some pa-tients still have multi-imaging-negative focal epilepsy. Thus, the development of other tracers for more precise detection of foci is desirable.