Imagine your body being twisted into strange contortions by uncontrollable muscle convulsions, drooling, and nonsense mumbling. When a person is having a seizure, these actions are common. Now imagine you’ve had this happen to you before, and it could happen any moment of the day, when you least expect it. Epilepsy is the neurological disorder of a person after they have experienced two or more seizures. About 45,000 children under the age of fifteen are diagnosed with epilepsy each year. (“About Epilepsy” 2008) In most cases, seizures can be controlled through medication. However, when medication doesn’t work, thousands of people see their standard of living decrease, and their risk of death increase.
After medication use, surgery is currently the last option for treating many types of epilepsy. The doctor has to first examine and pinpoint the exact location where the brain dysfunction is occurring. He or she has to take out the dysfunctional brain tissue but keep healthy tissue in tact to prevent any damage to key parts of the brain (Fraunfelder). Seizures happen because of aberrant wiring of nerve cells, or neurons, in the brain. In normal conditions these neurons in the brain intermittently transmit signals to each other and then transmit signals to the rest of the body in a smooth and efficient manner. However sometimes a group of nerve cells in a specific area of the brain could have it’s functions disrupted and the neurons will repeatedly fire off signals to the rest of the body resulting in muscle convulsions otherwise known as epileptic seizures.
In the past, the only known method to diagnose epilepsy was to take an Electro Encephalogram (EEG) to map out the brain. EEG involves attaching electrodes to the scalp to measure and record electrical activity of the brain. Neurons in humans have a cell body and extensions of two types: dendrites, and axons. An axon delivers a signal to a dendrite from another nerve cell. This makes the synapse, a...