Determining if Surgery is the Right Treatment
Patients with seizures that begin from a single "hot spot" or seizure focus may benefit from a surgical treatment to remove the hot spot, if this can be done without injury to other parts of the brain. At the UC San Diego Epilepsy Center, we perform intense evaluations to determine whether epilepsy surgery may help control seizures that cannot be controlled by medicine alone.
One evaluation is called the Wada test, named after neurologist Juhn Wada. The purpose of the Wada test is to ensure that epilepsy surgery will not result in language or memory deficits.
The series of images and captions below show the steps of the Wada test.