Microscopic tissue diagnosis of human brain disorders remains the gold standard in modern medicine. Yet, histopathology training in epileptic disorders is difficult to obtain in many European countries.
EpiCARE offers a comprehensive neuropathology service for all of their members. Currently, our working group mainly addresses three activities:
1) The European Epilepsy Brain Bank with a collection of more than 10.000 histopathology diagnoses obtained from epilepsy surgery. This unprecedented dataset is further used for benchmark EpiCARE projects on disease aetiologies, outcome and pathomechanisms.
2) We offer a diagnostic histopathology consultation for surgical brain samples obtained from epilepsy surgery using standardized protocols. The results are available through the CPMS platform. Formalin- fixed and paraffin- embedded tissue specimens should be sent to the neuropathology laboratory in Erlangen, Germany or can be shared online as fully digitized slides.
3) Finally, we offer an interactive, online post-surgical patient management conferences to discuss surgical brain specimens from various European epilepsy surgery centres.
Our efforts will help guide histopathologists in Europe to harmonize their diagnosis and diagnostic tools according to current medical standards, i.e. ILAE and WHO classification schemes, and help to deliver best medical care for our patients with difficult-to-treat rare and complex epilepsies. This work is likely to also influence the histopathology work-up outside Europe.
EU-FP6/FP7 funded European Epilepsy Brain Bank
The European Epilepsy Brain Bank (EEBB) has enrolled more than 10.000 epilepsy surgery patients from 36 centers in 14 European countries (Blümcke et al. 2017; Lamberink et al. 2020). EEBB is a virtual database collecting a minimal data set for each (double-encoded) patient, e.g. age at epilepsy surgery, age at seizure onset, sex, location of the epileptic lesion, year of surgery, 12-24-60 month postsurgical outcome, antiseizure medication). This unprecedented databank is used for benchmark projects on disease etiologies in focal epilepsy (Blümcke et al. 2017) and post-surgical outcome (Lamberink et al. 2020). Tissue storage will help to enable future research projects, in particular addressing genetic causes of focal brain lesions and epileptogenicity.
Neuropathology service for microscopic brain tissue review
Members of this workgroup offer the large experience in standardized neuropathological examination, i.e. establishing ILAE guidelines and classification systems. All tissue specimens will remain the courtesy of submitting centers and returned upon completion of the analysis. Guidelines for standardized tissue fixation, long-term preservation and storage have previously been published and can be downloaded through this website (Blümcke et al. 2016). Formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded tissue specimens should be send for microscopic review to the postal address below.
We offer a monthly online discussion forum for post-surgical patients in order to review the histopathology findings. The post-surgical discussion forum is targeted for clinicians, neurosurgeons and histopathologists. Each case will be presented with the patient’s clinical history and surgical procedure. The microscopy findings will be reviewed live using our digital microscopy platform. The discussion of differential diagnosis and postsurgical outcome will conclude each case presentation. If you are interested to join this forum, or present a case please email to [email protected].
For patient presentation, we request to obtain the patient consent using the standardized EU form.
February 2020. Lyon (France). Ingmar Blümcke.
If you are interested to voluntarily contribute to this WG activities, please use the contact form to let us know.
