Key Points
- The 2022 Annual Meeting of the AES was held December 2–6 in Nashville, Tennessee.
- Harvard neurologist Ellen Bubrick, MD, led a special session on “Focused Ultrasound: A Rapidly Growing, New Approach to Epilepsy Treatment.”
- The workshop described how various mechanisms of action of focused ultrasound can be used in the treatment of many types of epilepsy.
The 2022 Annual Meeting of the AES was held December 2–6 in Nashville, Tennessee. As one of the oldest neurological professional organizations in the United States, AES holds the largest worldwide meeting and exhibition for scientific and clinical research on epilepsy and clinical neurophysiology.
On Sunday, December 4, Ellen Bubrick, MD, assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and associate neurologist in the Department of Neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, led a special session on focused ultrasound at the meeting. The session was an Investigators Workshop titled “Focused Ultrasound: A Rapidly Growing, New Approach to Epilepsy Treatment.”
Along with Dr. Bubrick, the expert panel included Raag Airan, MD, PhD (Stanford University), Charles Caskey, PhD (Vanderbilt University), and Vibhor Krishna, MBBS, MS (the University of North Carolina). The workshop described how focused ultrasound can be used for ablative (high intensity) or neuro-modulatory (low intensity) effects in the treatment of many types of epilepsy. It also covered current clinical trials for ablation and neuromodulation in epilepsy and promising preclinical studies that are using focused ultrasound to open the blood-brain barrier (BBB) for targeted drug delivery.
More than 7,600 physicians, scientists, advanced practice providers, nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, engineers, pharmacists, advocates, and other professionals from 70 countries attend the conference to share data and learn about the diagnosis, study, prevention, treatment, and cure of epilepsy. The meeting also offered a virtual attendance option, ES 2022 Digital Select, to provide recordings of approximately 120 hours of selected programming and access to ePosters from December 13, 2022, through March 13, 2023 (90 days).