{"id":180801,"date":"2025-09-30T20:04:12","date_gmt":"2025-09-30T20:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/180801\/"},"modified":"2025-09-30T20:04:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T20:04:12","slug":"ai-tool-detects-tiny-brain-lesions-to-help-children-with-epilepsy-live-seizure-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/180801\/","title":{"rendered":"AI tool detects tiny brain lesions to help children with epilepsy live seizure-free"},"content":{"rendered":"

John was a “typical, thriving” eight-year-old boy when one night he woke up feeling very strange.<\/p>\n

His arms were stiffening and jerking, and it felt like he was falling. He was scared.<\/p>\n

John was suffering from an epileptic seizure, and from that night on, he continued to have multiple seizures a day for years.<\/p>\n

“It completely rocked our world,” John’s dad Spiros said.<\/p>\n

“I’m getting goosebumps now just talking about it.”\"A<\/p>\n

Anti-seizure medication was unable to prevent John from having multiple seizures a day. (Supplied)<\/p>\n

About one in 200 children in Australia has epilepsy<\/a>, and for many, their seizures are considered to be “uncontrolled” or drug-resistant.<\/p>\n

“The seizures usually start out of the blue during the preschool or early school years before escalating to multiple times a day,” Dr Emma Macdonald-Laurs, a neurologist at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital, said.<\/p>\n

“The longer a child continues to have uncontrolled seizures, the more likely they are to develop learning difficulties, including intellectual disability.”<\/p>\n

John, now 11 years old, was among more than 21,000 children in Victoria living with Cortical dysplasias, one of the most common causes of epilepsy.<\/p>\n

But since May 2025, he has been seizure-free.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

John has not had a seizure since his surgery in May 2025. (Supplied)<\/p>\n

A new AI tool developed by a team at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) and The Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) helped detect the tiny dysplasia lesion in John’s brain.<\/p>\n

It led to targeted surgery that changed his life.<\/p>\n

“I just wanted to get it out of me,” John said.<\/p>\n

“After the surgery, now I feel much better and now we’re just back to normal.”AI helps put puzzle together<\/p>\n

Cortical dysplasias are hard to spot on a routine MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), with less than half being recognised on a child’s first scan, according to researchers.<\/p>\n

Families struggle as epilepsy fails NDIS funding criteria <\/a><\/p>\n

Adeline is a cheeky seven-year-old but her epilepsy has left her brain damaged, and the NDIS won’t help, leaving her family desperate for access to therapies that could help her.<\/p>\n

Using an advanced AI-based tool they called the ‘AI epilepsy detective’, the team set out to detect the tiny brain lesions faster and allow for more precise treatment.<\/p>\n

“Epilepsy due to cortical dysplasia can be improved or cured with epilepsy surgery if the abnormal brain tissue can be located and removed,” Dr Macdonald-Laurs said.<\/p>\n

The Melbourne researchers conducted a study involving 71 children at the RCH and 23 adults at the Austin Hospital with cortical dysplasia and focal epilepsy, which causes recurring seizures.<\/p>\n

Published in Epilepsia,<\/a> the study found lesions the size of a blueberry in up to 94 per cent of cases.<\/p>\n

The tool does not replace radiologists, epilepsy doctors, or the human examination, lead researcher Dr Macdonald-Laurs said.<\/p>\n

“It is like a detective that helps us put the puzzle pieces together quicker so we can offer potentially life-changing surgery earlier,” she said.Training AI with advanced imaging<\/p>\n

A PET scan, or Positron Emission Tomography, was used alongside MRIs to help train the AI detector to find cortical dysplasia lesions.<\/p>\n

PET scans can measure the activity of the brain and highlight regions with an abnormality in the colour blue.<\/p>\n

Dr Sila Genc from the MCRI Developmental Imaging Group said layers of advanced imaging were crucial.<\/p>\n

The combined data allowed the AI tool to detect lesions with “higher certainty”.<\/p>\n

“Which allows us to avoid critical areas when the surgeons are going to remove these brain abnormalities,” Dr Genc said.<\/p>\n

\"Five<\/p>\n

John’s brain scans were overlaid with the AI detector that highlighted an area of dysplasia as seen in image E. (Supplied)<\/p>\n

The study found 80 per cent of patients had their diagnosis missed by human examination of their MRI results.<\/p>\n

Dr Macdonald-Laurs said the tool was able to scan large amounts of data to help draw the viewer’s eye towards the lesion.<\/p>\n

“Then the radiologist can confirm, ‘Oh, hey, that little tiny area in the brain is really abnormal. I think this is maybe consistent with other data and the cause of the child’s epilepsy,'” she said.<\/p>\n

The best results were seen using information from both MRI and PET scans, with a success rate of 94 per cent.<\/p>\n

Of the 17 children in the test group, 12 had surgery and 11 are now seizure-free.<\/p>\n

Loading…Results ‘a dream’ for children with epilepsy<\/p>\n

Six-year-old Royal was having clusters of up to 19 seizures within a two-hour period.<\/p>\n

MRI scans were not providing answers, and anti-seizure medications were not giving him relief.<\/p>\n

“The seizures started to become increasingly frequent, from a couple a day to one every half an hour, until they started to appear in clusters,” Royal’s mum Gurjinder said.<\/p>\n

“Every time Royal’s whole body would freeze for at least a minute and as the days went on, he lost his appetite.”\"A<\/p>\n

Royal went from having multiple seizures a day to being seizure-free following the procedure. (Supplied)<\/p>\n

Doctors at RCH eventually detected Royal’s cortical dysplasia with the help of the AI tool, and the lesion was removed.<\/p>\n

Gurjinder said her son had not had a seizure since.<\/p>\n

Researchers said the only risk involved was the small amount of radiation children might be exposed to with PET scans.<\/p>\n

But it was typical for PET scans to be used in their epilepsy diagnosis.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Gurjinder says the detection allowed them to treat Royal’s condition before his health deteriorated further. (Supplied)<\/p>\n

Researchers hope they will be able to soon test the ‘AI epilepsy detective’ in paediatric hospitals across Australia.<\/p>\n

“Our next plans are to test this detector in more real-life hospital settings on new, undiagnosed patients across Australia, and also to research what children, parents, and doctors think about us using AI in their epilepsy diagnosis,” Dr Macdonald-Laurs said.<\/p>\n

John felt “safe in the hands” of his doctors and was excited by the advancements.<\/p>\n

His dad Spiros described the outcome as “like a dream with a wonderful ending”.<\/p>\n

“The results are just \u2026 there’s no words to explain it, it’s just amazing.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"John was a “typical, thriving” eight-year-old boy when one night he woke up feeling very strange. His arms…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":180802,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,1362,116201,4014,10095,1369,105],"class_list":["post-180801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-brain","tag-cortical-dysplasias","tag-epilepsy","tag-mri","tag-surgery","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180801\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/180802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}