
Bijoy Kundu, PhD
On March 13, 2024, the research of University of Virginia Associate Professor of Radiology and Medical Imaging Bijoy Kundu, PhD received a $100,000 grant from the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation in order to improve imaging technology for identifying important areas of the brain within epilepsy patients.
Epilepsy affects 1.6% of the US population, but 30-40% of those seizures are not adequately controlled by medicine. For patients with drug-resistant epilepsy, it’s recommended to identify the seizure onset zone within the brain in order to perform surgery. But finding these targets can be difficult and invasive.
It’s the reason behind the work of Dr. Kundu, in collaboration with UVA Professor of Neurology Mark Quigg, MD. They aim to develop an AI-powered method known as interictal Dynamic PET, or iD-PET, to locate seizure onset zones within patients and assist a successful surgical approach.
“The iD-PET technique will change clinical practice,” said Dr. Kundu. “Rather than mapping the uptake and metabolism of glucose in the brain in a static fashion, it maps the rate of glucose uptake, metabolism, and decay. We expect this more sensitive imaging technique to increase the proportion of patients with identifiable ‘PET-positive’ lesions to allow more patients to undergo transformative epilepsy surgery.”
The lab will use the funding of the Commonwealth Commercialization Fund grant to recruit more healthy control patients, streamline software, and work towards developing an easy-to-use, accessible toolkit.
For more information about this grant, click here. For more information about Dr. Kundu’s research, click here.
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