Pediatric Epilepsy Services

Advanced diagnosis and treatment for pediatric epilepsy

Our Pediatric Epilepsy Center provides comprehensive evaluation and expert care from pediatric epileptologists who specializes in the treatment of children with epilepsy. We offer a full spectrum of services, from initial diagnosis to the most advanced surgical interventions.

Diagnostic and medical management

  • Electrodiagnostic services: Including electroencephalogram (EEG), long-term outpatient monitoring, inpatient Video EEG (VEEG), and high density EEG for precise seizure localization.
  • Advanced neuroimaging: High-resolution MRI, functional MRI (fMRI), and positron emission tomography (PET) to enhance diagnostic accuracy.
  • Medical management: Access the latest therapeutics and participate in groundbreaking clinical trials.
  • Dietary therapies: Explore specialized programs such as the ketogenic diet for seizure management.
  • Neuropsychological support: Expert care from a neuropsychologist experienced in addressing learning and psychological challenges in children with epilepsy.

Surgical management

When medical management is insufficient, we offer advanced neurosurgical approaches:

  • Mapping and resection: Precise identification and removal of areas of the brain causing seizures, epileptic foci.
  • Neuromodulator devices: Innovative implants designed to help manage medically refractory epilepsy.
  • Hemispherotomy: Specialized surgical procedure for severe, uncontrolled epilepsy.
  • Navigated Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (nTMS) mapping: Non-invasive brain mapping to protect language and motor functions.

Navigated TMS (nTMS): Safer planning for brain surgery

Stanford Medicine Children's Hospital offers Nexstim SmartFocus® nTMS brain mapping for patients diagnosed with tumors and epilepsy who are considering brain surgery. This procedure helps us locate the areas of your brain important for movement and language. This information can help your neurologist and neurosurgeon plan the safest surgery. This information can also help your doctors in counseling you about potential surgical risks.

Understanding navigated TMS: What to expect during the procedure

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) is a generally harmless and safe procedure for stimulating the brain. Navigated TMS (nTMS) means using your child's MRI head scan to accurately guide the TMS procedure.

  1. Comfort first: Our Child Life staff will greet your family and help your child feel comfortable with the procedure. During this procedure, your child sits in a comfortable chair. Very young children may even sit in their parents’ laps.
  2. MRI guidance: We use the magnet to stimulate the brain and know exactly where we have stimulated because we are guided by your child’s MRI.
  3. Brain mapping:
    • For movement: When looking for brain regions important for movement, we use special stickers on the muscles to detect small twitches caused by the stimulation.
    • For language: When we do language mapping, your child plays a game where he/she names objects on a screen both without stimulation and with the stimulation. When regions important for language are stimulated, the stimulation will cause your child to make an error in the game.
  4. Result: After the TMS procedure, important motor and/or language regions are mapped onto your child’s individual MRI scan and shared with your doctors.

We are proud to offer TMS to children of many ages and developmental abilities. Our team includes neurodiagnostic technologists with many years of experience with children with epilepsy as well as a pediatric epileptologist.

Participate in TMS Research

We also invite all children who undergo language mapping to be part of our language mapping database. In this study, funded by the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Foundation, researchers from many large epilepsy centers are reviewing language mapping data to improve this procedure for all children considering neurosurgery.