Takeaways From AES 2021: Imad Najm, MD

WATCH TIME: 7 minutes

“The themes here, which I see in the next 3 to 5 years continuing to expand—hopefully in a way that will excite all of us to a point that we translate this into clinical practice—are the field of gene therapy and the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence.”

The 2021 American Epilepsy Society (AES) Annual Meeting, December 3-7, was held in Chicago and virtually, including presentations and updates across the field of epilepsy. Imad Najm, MD, director, Cleveland Clinic Epilepsy Center, Cleveland Clinic Neurological Institute, sat down with NeurologyLive® to discuss presentations that he was a part of at AES 2021, as well as takeaways from the conference overall. 

Najm was a part of several presentations, covering topics such as MR fingerprinting, specifically in in patients with MRI-negative intractable focal epilepsy, its use in the characterization of subcortical nuclei in medically intractable focal epilepsy, as well its radiomics for characterization of focal cortical dysplasia. Discussing lesion types, Najm commented on the research of his colleague Irene Wang, PhD, staff scientist, Cleveland Clinic Epilepsy Center; joint staff, department of biomedical engineering, Lerner Research Institute, Cleveland Clinic; and assistant professor of medicine. Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of medicine, who is working to identify portions of lesions that are epileptic, effectively communicating the extent of epileptic activity. Speaking to AES 2021 in general, Najm commented on the potential of genetics and gene therapy in the field of epilepsy, as well as artificial intelligence.