With NIH support, biomedical engineer Sri Sarma develops neurotechnologies to improve understanding and treatment of epilepsy.
Johns Hopkins biomedical engineer Sri Sarma is developing new technologies to pinpoint the exact origin of seizures in the brain—life-changing work for the roughly 21 million epilepsy patients worldwide whose seizures aren’t relieved by medications.
Removing the specific brain region where seizures originate is the last resort when medication fails. But current clinical tools make precisely locating the epileptogenic zone (EZ) extremely difficult, rendering surgery effective in only about half the cases. With funding from the National Institutes of Health, Sarma and her team help surgeons determine if and where they should operate, improving the success rate of epilepsy surgeries.