An ambitious project to map the human brain by the National Institutes of Health has funded a four-year, $5 million statewide study to image the brains of people with epilepsy. Researchers at UW-Madison and the Medical College of Wisconsin have joined the NIH Human Connectome Project, a national library of medical imaging data being used to create maps of human brain connectivity.

Past projects have imaged the brains of normal, healthy individuals. “To expand the study, the NIH has been soliciting research from so-called disease groups,” says Dr. Bruce Hermann, a professor in the Department of Neurology in the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.

“Wisconsin is fortunate to have strong research centers at both the Medical College of Wisconsin and here, where epilepsy research is a major interest with a large network within the medical school involving multiple departments,” Hermann says. “Wisconsin is going to lead the way on this.”

Brain scans will take place in both Milwaukee and Madison, blending academic and private medical centers in the project. “People will undergo sophisticated imaging and take cognitive behavioral tests,” says Hermann. “We will do our own analysis of the data here, but it will also get uploaded to the Human Connectome Project main website so investigators from around the world can have access to this data. We are pretty jazzed about this.”

“We will be examining 200 patients,” says Beth Meyerand, chair of the UW-Madison Department of Biomedical Engineering. “Our hope is that patterns will reveal themselves in a larger group study so we can see any abnormal connections that are related to seizures.”

“I love taking care of people and making their lives better, but I never wanted to be a doctor because I also really love math and engineering. Research in biomedical engineering is the perfect match,” says Meyerand. “I was interested in creating imaging studies for epilepsy because there are so many unknowns and so many epilepsy patients.”

Between 2.2 million and 3 million people are being treated for epilepsy nationwide. The symptoms and seizures we recognize as epilepsy may affect any part of the body, but the electrical events that produce them occur in the brain.

UW-Madison has a long history of applying medical imaging to understanding epilepsy. Meyerand and Hermann have been working together for 15 years. “NIH would only have awarded a grant of this size to a long-term program with positive results,” says Meyerand.

Meyerand’s specialty is MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging, a radiation-free way to create physical images of body tissues. As an engineer, she develops new ways to display the connectivity maps of the brain. “We will be creating brain maps for each patient.”

Using a mirror placed to let the patient inside an MRI machine see a screen at their feet, patients will respond to different shapes moving on the screen and perform memorization tasks. The study will focus on tasks that researchers expect people with epilepsy to have trouble with.

By mapping the flow of oxygenated blood while patients do mental tasks or respond to a stimulus, brain connections can be followed in real time. Meyerand and the research team expect to learn how the extent and severity of abnormal connections are related to the number and severity of seizures.

The Epilepsy Foundation says having seizures and epilepsy affects more than the patient’s health. It can affect safety, relationships, work, transportation and much more. The stigma is also a serious and unwelcome side effect.

“Epilepsy affects people of all ages from infants to seniors,” says Hermann. “And it’s an expensive disorder to treat. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates it costs Americans $15 billion a year. We hope this project will really advance understanding of epilepsy and the problems that come with it.”