Letter from the Guest Editors

Article Outline

• Copyright

This is the second volume of the journal Seminars in Ultrasound, CT, and MRI devoted to temporal lobe epilepsy. In this volume, we develop the main pathological aspects that affect the temporal lobe and which we may encounter when exploring the causes of complex partial crises.

In our daily practice we have noticed an increase in the number of requests for further study of epilepsy. This has led us to delve more deeply into this subject and to conduct magnetic resonance imaging studies that focus more directly on this zone and with a specific protocol. Consequently we have detected a greater number of lesions, some of which we have been almost at a loss to decide on their etiology. We deemed it appropriate, therefore, to include in this volume a review of all the entities we encountered in our studies of the temporal lobe that we found difficult to characterize.

We have divided the main topic into five sections dealing with the most important pathological groups. The first article is devoted to the pathological entity par excellence affecting the temporal lobe, which is the cause of the greatest part of the crisis and is susceptible to surgery: the mesial temporal sclerosis or hippocampal sclerosis. The authors have brought us up to date by focusing on subjacent histopathological aspects of this entity, and on how these manifest themselves in magnetic resonance imaging.

The second article consists of an excellent review of the development disorders that cause clinical epilepsy, with numerous examples to illustrate the range of entities.

Space-occupying lesions such as tumors and vascular malformations are dealt with in the third article. Diagnostic keys are provided to the entities most frequently encountered in our daily practice, most of which are treatable.

There are some entities that do not pertain to the three sections mentioned, but which must be recognized by the expert radiologist. An article has therefore been devoted exclusively to those less common lesions that affect the temporal lobe.

Finally, this review would not be complete without the perspective of the neurosurgeon on the large numbers of entities that cause temporal crises and that are susceptible to surgical treatment. We believe that it is important for the radiologist to know what must be done with these patients, and how they should be treated. This perspective, we feel, will widen our knowledge of this pathology and enable us to make more reliable diagnoses.

We would like once again to thank Seminars in Ultrasound, CT, and MRI for their confidence in our ability to accomplish this venture, and we hope that all those who read the various articles will appreciate and learn from them as much as we have in preparing them.

Our special thanks to the authors who have offered their work and their insight, and who by doing so have helped to promote a wider diffusion of knowledge in this area of medicine.