MRI of drug-resistant epilepsies: contribution of FLAIR sequence in a series of 150 patients

We studied the usefulness of the Fluid-Attenuated Inversion-Recovery (FLAIR) pulse sequence for patients with intractable seizures by reviewing the MR images of 150 consecutive patients including a standard imaging protocol and a FLAIR sequence. FLAIR images revealed a cortical lesion in 8 of the 81 patients with no lesion detected on the standard MR imaging protocol. In addition, FLAIR images provided additional informations for 13 patients of the 69 patients for whom a lesion was already detected on the standard MR imaging protocol. Therefore, our results indicated that FLAIR sequences were a useful imaging tool for patients with intractable seizures since it improved the MR diagnosis in 21 of 150 patients (14%).