NIH SciBites: Tracking Down Seizures in the Brain

Patients with epilepsy experience seizures due to uncontrolled electrical firing somewhere in the brain. Price Withers, a postbaccalaureate research fellow in the Intramural Research Program at the National Institutes of Health, is working on a better way to pinpoint the precise location of that abnormal firing by using a method similar to the one geophysicists use to zero in on the center of an earthquake. His research could someday help doctors more effectively eliminate their patients’ seizures.