KENICHIRO ONO: I'm a neurologist at the Department of Energy Affairs, Central Virginia Healthcare System and VCU Medical Center.

My line of work particularly involves folks who have seen other neurologists previously and may not have been prescribed, the combination of medications that helped treat their seizures, and they come to us seeking for more advanced therapies such as deep brain stimulation and responsive neurostimulation.

I don't personally conduct research, but Dr. Koch and I are collaborating to really better understand how the individual cells, on a microscopic level, conduct abnormal brain electricity patterns to cause seizures.

There's very much that we don't understand in how seizures start, but also really how they're interconnected with each other in terms of fancy computer network, you know?

The brain is a mysterious organ where brain electricity changes, occur in ways that we don't understand in fractions of a second.

It's only until recently that we've been able to use technology to better understand what exactly happens on that microscopic level.

If it's something that we understand better, that information might be used to either predict whether or not, a seizure is going to occur or maybe some more targeted therapy, surgical therapy, that could be even more precise than the methods that we have right now because medications certainly may not be the complete solution right now.

I'm usually the first person that a patient will see when they've reached a point where medications don't control their seizures.

I'll explain to them that, what my suspicions are about the situation, and we'll still try different medications, different medication combinations, but really, that's just to kind of buy us some time while we're doing the investigations to figure out whether surgery's right for these patients.

During that path, a patient may encounter multiple other neurologists, while they're in the hospital with us, and they'll also interact with our neuropsychologists to kind of really see how the epilepsy is not just impacting life when it's occurring.

You know, there's a lot of hidden consequences of the epilepsy, particularly related to thinking.

The areas of the brain that are impacted by seizures are still important and they're still doing work, but when they're interrupted by seizures, just day-to-day thinking that we take for granted, just doesn't work the way it should.

Along that path, patients may encounter three or four other doctors after seeing me until they finally meet the the neurological surgeon that has the right tools and the techniques to really make that impactful treatment happen.