Maeike Zijlmans

Maeike Zijlmans is a neurologist and principle investigator at the UMC Utrecht Brain Center and Stichting Epilepsie Instellingen Nederland (SEIN). She finished her PhD with honors in May 2011 (prof van Huffelen, Utrecht, and prof Gotman, Montreal). Her thesis is about new presurgical techniques to characterize the focus of epilepsy. These techniques included EEG-fMRI, magnetoencephalography (MEG), special EEG electrodes and 3 T MRI. She stayed at the Montreal Neurological Institute for one year where she studied the use of high frequency oscillations (HFOs) in depth EEG in presurgical epilepsy patients.  She applied the acquired knowledge at the UMC Utrecht to record HFOs with corticography during surgery. This work ultimately led to the conduct of a prospective randomized controlled trial 'the HFO trial' comparing the use of HFOs to spikes as electrical biomarkers for epileptic tissue during epilepsy surgery. Results are expected to be published in 2022. Another part of...