Electrocorticography in the management of surgically treated epileptic patients

OBJECTIVE: To report our experience on 8 patients with mean age of onset of seizures of 8 years, who had intra-operative electrocorticography monitoring during the surgical treatment of their medically intractable partial epilepsy.

METHODS: Post-resection electrocorticography grades were according to Jay et al and seizure outcome was a according to Kobayashi et al grades.

RESULTS: Five patients had temporal lobe surgery and 3 patients had extra temporal surgery. Four patients had post-resection electrocorticography grade A (no residual epileptic activity), two of them had seizure outcome grade 1 (free of seizures) and the other 2 had grade 11 (free of seizures on medication). The other 4 patients had post-resection electrocorticography grade B (minimal residual epileptic activity) and all had seizure outcome grade 11 except one patient who had grade 111 (more than 50% reduction in seizure frequency).

CONCLUSION: Despite the small size of our study, our results suggest that intra-operative electrocorticography may be an important tool in the surgical management of medically intractable epilepsy.