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Overview
The UCL Epilepsy Imaging Group is part of the Department of Clinical and Experimental Epilepsy, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology. It is primarily based in the Epilepsy Society MRI Unit, Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire and is located in a dedicated building adjacent to the newly opened Epilepsy Society Research Centre.
In 2019, there was a major upgrade to the Chalfont MR scanner, funded by UCLH Charity to enable increase resolution, particularly of diffusion MRI.
The Chalfont ES MRI Unit is a key component of extensive collaborations with colleagues at UCL, particularly the Centre for Medical Image Computing, and externally at King’s College London and Newcastle University. The greatly enhanced connectivity and the state of the art scan storage facility enables scan data to be accessible, with appropriate controls from other sites, so that a large proportion of data analysis is carried out at other locations.
The acquisition of MRI data at Chalfont is crucial, as it is co-located with the Gowers Centre and outpatients and research MRI can be concatenated with clinical MRI. Further, a considerable amount of image analysis is carried out of MRI scans that are acquired for clinical purposes, which is a fundamental tenet of the UCLH-UCL shared vision of having a Research Hospital.
Teaching
In March 2017, 2018 an 2019 Professor Koepp organized the International League against Epilepsy Neuroimaging course, at Chalfont MRI and Research Centre. This is very highly regarded internationally, with delegates coming from all over the world, and is always oversubscribed.It is expected to be online in summer 2021.
Research areas
These include : Optimizing epilepsy surgery, Analysis of brain structure, Machine learning and quantitative MRI, Language, memory and brain function, Post-mortem MRI, Inflammation and blood brain imaging, and Pharmaco-fMRI . Please see our Research Areas page for further information
Future look
In 2020 we will continue our current research priorities of imaging language and memory and the structural basis of these in epilepsy, and to visualize multimodal data in 3-dimensions for the optimization of epilepsy surgery. We will further link imaging data with genetics in the ENIGMA project. We will set-up imaging of inflammation and break-down of the blood-brain-barrier in epilepsy and co-morbidities, and will further explore the effects of anti-epileptic drugs, both on functional and structural networks.
We will explore the possibility of using MRI as an adjunct to post-mortem examination of individuals who succumb to SUDEP, to try to better understand the causation of this tragedy.
In the next 5 years, epilepsy imaging research will need access to a 7T scanner, if it is to be globally competitive and to have this linked with a MEG facility using novel mobile MEG technology.
Contact Details
Epilepsy Society MRI Unit, Chesham Lane, Chalfont St Peter, SL9 0RJ
Tel: +44 (0)1494 601360 - Fax: +44 (0)1494 875945
