The standard clinical evaluation of epilepsy includes MRI and often other imaging modalities to assess for a broad range of potential etiologies. This collection of etiologic possibilities is too numerous for a book chapter but not so vast that it cannot be gathered into a moderate length reference text. Such a text would be a convenient resource in neurologic and radiologic practice and useful for board exam review, especially if it is oriented to the salient aspects of radiologic identification and clinical presentation. The proposed book's organization achieves this by surveying the radiologically evident causes of epilepsy with each chapter dedicated to one cause, and then structuring each chapter into two essential sections: Radiologic Features and Clinical Examples. By referring back to the Radiologic Features, the Case Examples lace the imaging results into a clinical context that facilitates the reader's understanding and retention.



The Radiologic Features sections follow a uniform organization across the chapters to facilitate the reader's use of the book. Each chapter begins with a description of the structural MRI features of the pathology with the routine imaging sequences and discusses the typical and the atypical appearances. The section then expands into less commonly used MRI sequences followed by the other imaging modalities that are relevant for the discussed pathology, which may include Diffusion Tensor Imaging, MR angiography, MR spectroscopy, PET, CT, CT angiography, invasive angiography, SPECT, and magnetic source imaging. The Radiologic Features section ends with discussion of differentiation of the chapter's topic from similarly appearing pathology. The Radiologic Features text is intended to provide a foundation for the Case Examples' clinical discussion and figures.







The Case Examples section includes 2 to 4 cases, each of which follows the same a structured overview of individual patients diagnosed with the chapter's topic. The overview includes: 1) seizure features (age of onset, auras, seizure behaviors, frequency), 2) relevant clinical findings (neurologic, neuropsychological/cognitive, psychiatric, and others when relevant), 3) interictal and ictal EEG description, 4) Other diagnostic tests (functional MRI, intra-arterial amobarbital test/Wada, cortical stimulation mapping), (5) treatment course (pharmacologic and, when present, neurostimulatory and resection with histopathologic findings). Each Case Example refers to 8 to 10 figures depicting the patient's imaging results, so the book's entire figure collection exists in clinical contexts and across multiple imaging modalities. The figure captions will highlight the features that were discussed in the Radiologic Features section.



Material for the proposed book will be drawn from the UCLA Seizure Disorder Center, which serves a large outpatient epilepsy patient population and performs approximately 500 inpatient epilepsy evaluations annually. The evaluations routinely include multiple imaging modalities, so images across the scope of radiologic tests will be readily available. With several Case Examples in each chapter and multiple figures for each Case Example, the chapters will provide a comprehensive and clinically relevant review of the pathology's radiologic features.