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ll the human beings possess a right to be good in health and to live culturally in a civilized world. However, the patients of drug-resistive epilepsy are left out of this motto and have no other choice to be given surgery for avoiding seizures. Even in the case, not only the epileptogenic focus but also healthy brain is resected because of the localization accuracy of epileptogenic focus and the difficulty of discrimination. Thus the patients, not infrequently, suffer from the residual disability such as defect of memory, cognition disorder, mental disorder, motor dysfunction, speech and language disorder, etc. Consequently these patients remain out of the motto described above.

In order to save this kind of patients, the project team was organized by the researchers from Kyushu Institute of Technology, Yamaguchi University and Shizuoka University, and supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Specially Promoted Research (Project No.20001008), "Identification of Epileptogenic Focus by Employing Softcomputing and Establishment of Minimally Invasive and Definitive Surgery (Project Director : T.Yamakawa)" granted in 2008 by Japan Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

The objective of this project is to establish the minimally invasive and definitive surgery. It may be realized by the precise localization of epileptogenic focus and the necrotizing the tissue excluding the healthy brain through small holes in the cranial bone.

This workshop has been organized to discuss about this subject and share the problem and knowledge concerning minimally invasive and definitive surgery. I would hope all the participants will find out some aspects from the discussion.

March 28, 2009

Takeshi Yamakawa
General Chair of CADET 2009