Pediatric Epilepsy Services

We diagnose and treat epilepsy using state-of-the-art medical and surgical management:

• Evaluation and treatment by a pediatric epileptologist who specializes in the care of children with epilepsy
• Electrodiagnostic services, including EEG, long-term outpatient, inpatient VEEG, and high density EEG for seizure localization
• Medical Management including a wide range of new therapeutics and access to clinical trials
• Dietary therapies including the ketogenic diet
• A neuropsychologist experienced in the learning and psychological issues facing children with epilepsy
• Neurodiagnostic testing including MRI, functional MRI, positron emission tomography (PET)
• Neurosurgical approaches when medical management is failing
  • Neuromodulatory devices for treating medically refractory epilepsy
  • Mapping and resection of epileptic foci
  • TMS functional brain mapping
  • Hemispherotomy for severe, uncontrolled epilepsy

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 parts 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.

What is navigated TMS?

TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) is a generally harmless and safe procedure for stimulating the brain. Navigated TMS (nTMS) means using your child's MRI headscan to accurately guide the TMS procedure. During this procedure, your child sits in a comfortable chair. Very young children may even sit in their parents’ laps. We use the magnet to stimulate the brain, and know exactly where we have stimulated because we are guided by your child’s MRI. When looking for brain regions important for movement, we use special stickers on the muscles to detect small twitches caused by the stimulation. 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. After the TMS procedure, important motor and/or language regions will be 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 fantastic Child Life staff will greet your family and help your child feel comfortable with the procedure. Our team includes neurodiagnostic technologists with many years of experience with children with epilepsy as well as a pediatric epileptologist.

Want to be involved 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.

We are excited to welcome you for TMS functional brain mapping!