英国新闻听力 癫痫症治疗新手段（在线收听）

Scientists in southern England say they've developed a new technique to deal with epilepsy. It involves far more specific identification of the regions in the brain that trigger seizures. The idea is that surgeons can then perform far more precise interventions. Mark Goodfellow is with the Center for Biomedical Modeling and Analysis at the University of Exeter.

We are aiming to tackle one of the most important problems in epilepsy research which is to define the region of brain tissue that needs to be resected in order to render a patient's seizure free.

Well, when you say resected, you mean cut out?

Cut out. Yes, exactly. And the neurosurgery team is faced with several bits of data that they have to collate in order to define a surgical plan. And this data involves electrographic recording, so data of the electrical fields of the brain, they are recorded via a set of sensors. They are implanted under the skull. And what we've done is take this data and build a network model of the brain. So we make a representation of the brain that is a network where each of the different nodes corresponds to a sensor that is recording this electrical information. And we can calculate the degree of correlation between these electros to build a network representation. And what we've done is to put a mathematical model onto this network so that we can simulate the dynamics of the brain. So we can simulate the recordings that would be observed in patients. And this allows us to get a sense of how prone these networks are to the generating seizures. And it also allows us to test different surgical strategies in the model and calculate or quantify the extent to which these strategies would lead to a reduction in seizures.

And how have you been able to test those models, test you know both how precise you are in terms of mapping where the seizures are and also how different interventions might work?

So to do this, we've utilized some excellent data from our colleagues in Berne in Switzerland. And they have a data set where they studied 16 patients who have undergone surgical treatment for epilepsy. And they've managed to map on the position of the electros that we record from to the locations of the brain that we have actually removed, so we know whereon network is in the brain, we know which nodes of that network have actually been removed in the surgery.

英国南部科学家称他们研发了一项治疗癫痫症的新技术，能够更加具体地识别大脑中引发癫痫的区域。这主要是为了外科医生能更加精准地干预。马克·古德菲洛现在位于埃克塞特大学的生物建模与解析中心。

我们的目标是处理癫痫研究领域最重要的难题之一--限定需要切除的脑组织区域，让病人免受癫痫的困扰。

你说的"切除"指的是"割去"吗？

没错，"割去"。神经外科团队现在还需要整理一些数据，从而确定手术方案。这些数据主要是电图记录，也就是大脑电场的数据通过一组传感器被记录了下来，传感器被埋置在脑壳下。我们拿这些数据构建了一个大脑网络模型，用网络代表大脑，各个不同的节点对应一个记录电子信息的传感器。然后我们就能计算这些电子之间的相关度，从而构建网络表示法。我们在该网络上放置了数学模型，这样就能模仿大脑的动态，并且模仿从病人身上可以观察到的记录数据。同时，我们也能了解这些网络引发癫痫的倾向性，还能在模型中测试不同的手术治疗方法，计算或量化这些方法减轻癫痫的程度。

那你们如何测试那些模型的、测试癫痫定位的精准性和接入方法的特异性？

为了做到这些，我们使用了瑞典伯尔尼同事的一些非常好的数据。他们有一个数据组，对做过癫痫手术的16位病人进行研究。他们成功地把我们记录的电子位置映射到我们切除的大脑部分上，这样的话我们就知道是网络在大脑中的位置，还知道手术实际切除了网络上的哪些节点。