Epilepsy Fellowship - Pediatric
Director
Faculty
Susan Arnold, MD
Rana Said, MD
Deepa Sirsi, MD
Saadat Khan, MD
Muna Khan, MD
The Pediatric Epilepsy Fellowship is a one- to two-year program offering specialized training in neonatal and pediatric epilepsy and neurophysiology with a focus on management of intractable epilepsy and epilepsy surgery evaluation.
The program is based at the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center at Children’s Medical Center. This is a Level 4 pediatric epilepsy center with an 8-bed Epilepsy Monitoring Unit and an active epilepsy surgery program. Fellows also rotate through the adult UT Southwestern Epilepsy Center. Faculty include five pediatric and five adult epileptologists, as well as both pediatric and adult neuromuscular and sleep disorders specialists. Curriculum covers all aspects of clinical neurophysiology and includes one to two formal neurophysiology lectures per week and attendance at a weekly epilepsy patient management conference.
The Neurophysiology Laboratory at Children’s Medical Center performs more than 3500 pediatric EEGs and evoked potential studies each year and more than 200 EMG and nerve conduction studies. The Epilepsy Monitoring unit has approximately 600 yearly admissions for inpatient video-EEG monitoring. The Comprehensive Epilepsy Center has 5,000 outpatient pediatric epilepsy clinic visits per year and includes multidisciplinary clinics for the ketogenic diet, epilepsy surgery, and genetic syndromes programs.
Parkland Hospital and Children’s Medical Center, with 119 NICU beds combined, provide extensive experience with neonatal EEG. First year fellows spend the majority of their time focused on epilepsy and EEG, but also rotate through the neuromuscular service and learn both pediatric and adult EMG and nerve conduction testing. They learn polysomnogram interpretation in the adult sleep lab at UT Southwestern. Opportunities are available for clinical research with on-going investigational anti-epileptic drug trials. Those successfully completing the program are eligible for certification in both the American Board of Clinical Neurophysiology and the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology Added Qualifications in Clinical Neurophysiology.
An optional second year of fellowship training prepares candidates for academic practice in a pediatric epilepsy surgery center. The focus of the second year is on epilepsy surgery evaluation and management. Fellows build on their first year training in these areas, and become proficient at surgical evaluation including ictal SPECT, PET, fMRI, and Wada testing. They have greater opportunity to learn intraoperative monitoring, corticography, and cortical mapping procedures. Fellows also are expected to complete an independent research project for both presentation at a national meeting and publication.