Your Donations in Action: Zofia M. Lasiecka, MD, PhD
Advancing Memory Outcome Risk Assessment in Minimally Invasive Epilepsy Treatment
For people living with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), the challenges extend beyond seizures. Long-term memory impairment is among the most common concerns, along with a wide spectrum of cognitive defects.
Stereotactic laser amygdalohippocampotomy (SLAH) is an emerging minimally invasive treatment option for TLE patients, potentially offering seizure control comparable to open anterior temporal lobectomy, while also showing more favorable memory outcomes. Although task-based functional MRI (t-fMRI) is already used to assess memory decline risk after temporal lobe surgery, its value in predicting outcomes after SLAH has not been well studied.
For her 2025 Research Resident/Fellow Grant project, Zofia M. Lasiecka, MD, PhD, assistant professor of radiology and imaging sciences in the Division of Neuroradiology at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, and colleagues sought to determine whether memory-specific scene-recognition fMRI task could help predict postsurgical visual memory performance.
Their retrospective study included 60 patients with medication-resistant epilepsy who underwent SLAH between 2011 and 2019 and had pre-surgical t-fMRI along with visual memory neuropsychological testing before and after surgery.
As expected, the scene-recognition task produced bilateral activation in the hippocampus and related posterior memory networks, with stronger right-hemispheric activation overall.
Patients with poor visual memory before SLAH or memory decline after surgery showed lower brain activation during the task, particularly in the left hemisphere. By contrast, patients with stronger or preserved visual memory showed more robust bilateral activation patterns.
Dr. Lasiecka said the findings suggest presurgical scene-recognition t-fMRI could help physicians better assess the risk of visual memory decline after SLAH.
Funding from the R&E Foundation allowed Dr. Lasiecka to expand her expertise in t-fMRI analysis and conduct this research with greater independence.
“The R&E Foundation grant was crucial in providing dedicated research time, as well as funds for training, equipment and collaborators’ effort, to learn t-fMRI data analysis, work with expert collaborators and analyze data efficiently,” Dr. Lasiecka said.
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