Platinum electrode arrays are playing a key role in an innovative new strategy designed to boost the success of resective brain surgery, it emerged on Tuesday (18th August).

A team of researchers at Albany Medical College in the US have developed a mapping system which will help surgeons to avoid damaging key areas of the brain during their work.

Resective brain surgery involves removing sections of abnormal brain tissue which are often located near vital brain functions linked to language, movement and sensation.

However, the mapping system makes use of electrocorticography (ECoG) - recordings of electrical activity in the brain - and a range of advanced technologies developed by the Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of Health.

The new process was tested alongside the previous approach, called electrical cortical stimulation (ECS), on ten patients who needed brain tissue partially removed to help tackle seizures.

As part of their use of ECoG, the researchers implanted platinum electrode arrays in the patients' skulls in the most prominent membrane layers in the vicinity of the brain and spinal cord.

The electrodes then recorded data directly from the patients' brains which were emitted when they were asked to complete a basic action, such as lifting their hands.

With the software subsequently pinpointing the location of the electrical activity, the ECoG approach was found to be safer, cheaper, easier and quicker to apply than ECS.

The results of the tests - which were carried out with scientists at Washington University School of Medicine, the University of Wisconsin, the University Medical Center Utrecht and Graz University of Technology - appear in July's edition of the journal Epilepsy and Behaviour.

Source:

Albany Medical College Team Develops Unique Real-Time Brain Mapping System (18/08/09)

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