ILAE School on Pre-Surgical Evaluation for Epilepsy and Epilepsy Surgery (EPODES)

Course on Epilepsy Surgery

European Project on Development of Epilepsy Surgery (EPODES)

Epilepsy surgery is underutilized as a treatment for drug-resistant epilepsy and there is not adequate training in this subject. There is an increasing demand and interest lately and in many European countries new epilepsy surgery programmes have been started. As a core course program with the support of CEA, courses on epilepsy surgery were initiated in Brno, Czech Republic. There is now a three year epilepsy surgery cycle with courses in different topics every year. The first course in 2008 and the second one in 2012 were basic ones with lectures on surgically remediable epilepsies, presurgical evaluation, electrophysiology, imaging, neuropsychology and psychiatry and interactive tutorials with presentations by students and tutors.

In 2013, the advanced course, Optimizing Outcomes of Epilepsy, was held with 42 students from 17 different countries. Twenty-four European students received bursary including lodging, course materials and certain amount of travel. There were 13 tutors from 7 European countries who gave lectures and tutorials. For the first time on the last day of the course, the last presentation was given by a former student from Serbia who established a surgery programme after attending to the first course and then staying in Prague with the fellowship bursary provided by the EPODES programme of CEA.

In January 2014, the third course of the cycle, Pediatric Epilepsy, Palliative Procedures and MR Negative Epilepsies, was held with 37 students from 14 countries including Sri Lanka and South Africa where 10 of them paid by themselves and rest received partial or full bursaries. There was a presentation from Petia Dimova (a student from the first course who stayed in Grenoble with fellowship programme) on the last day about her launching surgery programme in Sofia-Bulgaria.

In 2015 the three year cycle began again with a course on basic information about epilepsy surgery.