Chapters Transcript Video Laser Interstitial Thermal Therapy (LITT) as a Treatment for Epilepsy Dr. Bradley Lega describes laser interstitial thermal therapy (LITT) and its uses as a treatment for intractable epilepsy. UT Southwestern was the first hospital in North Texas to adopt laser therapy. Laser interstitial thermal therapy or lit involves placing a fiber that's between 1.5 and 3 millimeters in diameter into the brain in order to take away some kind of lesion, and that lesion can be a tumor. It can be an area that's causing epilepsy. For a patient that's referred for intractable epilepsy, we recommend li laser therapy only after the case has been presented and discussed with neurosurgeons like me, but also with the epilepsy neurologist, radiologists, neuropsychologists. One of the reasons that laser therapy has become more widely adopted is because it's less invasive. That means small incision, about 1 centimeter in length, and then opening the bone about 2 or 3 millimeters, then placing the laser fiber. The advantage is that recovery time is generally faster. For patients that undergo laser treatment for epilepsy, 95% of the time they're going home the next morning after surgery. Another thing that sets apart the program here for laser therapy at UT Southwestern is the availability of the intraoperative MRI environment. We have an operating room connected to an MRI scanner, and so we can get MRI scans throughout the normal course of surgery. And for laser therapy, it's especially helpful to improve the safety and efficiency of the surgery, because everything is right there. You can do all the same techniques that you'd want to use in the operating room environment, and then the MRI is immediately at hand with dedicated expert technicians who know how to work with the laser technology. So we're taking an MRI scan every 4 or 5 seconds, and the MRI is what's telling us what we've done. What is the laser done and to make sure that we take away the lesion, but also don't injure or encroach upon normal brain areas nearby. One of the things that I'm proud of with our laser program for treating intractable epilepsy at UT Southwestern is how we think about using it in combination with other therapies. There are many cases in which laser therapy is able to help improve someone's seizures, but it's not the only thing we do. We also add other technologies, something called responsive neural stimulation or deep brain stimulation, and so we are pushing the envelope and combining these different therapy options together to try to get the best outcome for patients. It's important to go to some place that knows how to use all the tools, and that certainly is true here at UT Southwestern. Created by
