A MEG powerhouse: How UTSW is pushing the limits of brain research, care
Dedicated team is expanding uses for the precision imaging tool to help epilepsy patients and delve deeper into Alzheimer’s, concussion, and other neurological conditions
DALLAS – Aug. 21, 2025 – Most days, neurologist Sasha Alick-Lindstrom, M.D., M.P.H., FAAN, FACNS, FAES, can be found staring at rows of brain signals on multiple computer screens, inspecting the squiggly lines for any irregularities or spikes of electrical activity.
Today she’s working in her office, but she could just as easily be in the hospital, her home office, the lab, or a classroom because, as Clinical Epilepsy Director of UT Southwestern Medical Center's Magnetoencephalography (MEG) Center of Excellence, that’s the job: reading between the lines, literally, to unlock the mystery of her patients’ crippling seizures.
The MEG is a state-of-the-art neuroimaging machine that can capture the brain’s signals with unparalleled precision. It relies on 306 sensors that, when secured to a patient’s head, pick up the magnetic fields produced by the brain’s electrical activity with ultra-high-speed temporal resolution.
And much like a detective, Dr. Alick-Lindstrom, an Associate Professor of Neurology and Radiology at UTSW, tracks down all 306 leads to find the misfiring neurons. She works side by side with Elizabeth Davenport, Ph.D., MEG Technical Director and Assistant Professor of Radiology at UT Southwestern, and Amy Proskovec, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Radiology, to take the raw data the MEG churns out and create a highly detailed 3D brain map to trace the seizures to their source.
Each Wednesday, they join about a dozen other specialists – neurosurgeons, radiologists, neuropsychologists, neuropsychiatrists, medical fellows, and a team of adult and pediatric epileptologists – for a larger surgical conference to review patient cases and pool the team’s collective findings to devise a clear diagnosis and treatment plan.
“MEG is clinically approved to localize epilepsy disorders and perform presurgical mapping,” Dr. Davenport said.
And its impact has been profound in that regard. Since 2020, the MEG program has helped hundreds of patients like 17-year-old Aarush Gotur, who was experiencing up to 25 seizures a day when he first came to Children’s Health and UTSW and now has been seizure-free for nearly two years. MEG has also cemented UTSW’s designation as a Level 4 Epilepsy Center, the highest level awarded by the National Association of Epilepsy Centers (NAEC), representing the most advanced care for epilepsy at a high-volume center. It was Joseph Maldjian, M.D., Professor of Radiology at UT Southwestern and Director of the Advanced Neuroscience Imaging Research (ANSIR) Lab, who had the vision and prescience to appeal to UTSW leaders and secure the $6 million in capital funding needed to bring the MEG machine online.
Now UTSW is testing the limits of this technology beyond epilepsy.
“The MEG has boundless research potential for all manner of neurological disorders including Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain injuries, autism, and schizophrenia, just to name a few,” said Dr. Davenport.
Several such studies are already underway in labs at UT Southwestern, which houses one of the fewer than 50 clinical MEG sites nationwide and serves the widest range of patient populations in North Texas.
The MEG brain trust
UTSW’s MEG program distinguishes itself in another way: The team of researchers, technologists, and physicians who run it consists almost entirely of women – an outlier in a highly specialized, male-dominated field. Dr. Davenport once described the community of MEG scientists as so small as to be able to “fit around a dinner table.”
Dr. Alick-Lindstrom added: “At conferences, typically attended by the same MEG researchers and clinicians, our team turns heads because we are usually the only women there.”
Afsaneh Talai, M.D., Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Neurology at UTSW and a member of the MEG team, focuses on treating children with intractable epilepsy disorders and believes patients benefit from the UTSW team’s different backgrounds and experiences.
“We can treat them more holistically,” she said. “This is especially true in a specialty as narrow as ours, and we’re better able to troubleshoot problems as they come up.”
A good example: One time when the staff was having trouble securing sensors, Dr. Davenport solved the issue by suggesting fashion tape.
Widening the field to women and recruiting more MEG trainees from varied backgrounds in general would introduce a heterogeneity of ideas and accelerate research, Dr. Alick-Lindstrom said. Before UT Southwestern launched its MEG program in late 2019, Drs. Alick-Lindstrom and Talai had to travel to Houston to receive specialized training.
“We want to advance the field and the technology, and that requires an investment in talent,” Dr. Alick-Lindstrom said. “MEG has been around since the first prototype was introduced around 1969, and there are so many research applications to explore.”
She and Dr. Davenport were awarded UTSW’s 2023 Synergy Grant for Collaborative Research and are currently investigating the use of a more mobile MEG device. Instead of the hulking piece of machinery that must be housed in a suite surrounded by 1-foot-thick walls to block out signal interference, the two hope to scale it down to something smaller and easier to maneuver, similar to an easily transportable helmet. The equipment was recently acquired.
“The goal is to eventually be able to deploy it for rapid-response situations, such as a traumatic brain injury or seizures on-site, rather than having to transport the patient to our center,” Dr. Alick-Lindstrom said.
Exploring Alzheimer’s, depression, and concussion
Dr. Davenport often describes the MEG by comparing it to Google Maps for the brain. It can look at locations and neighborhoods and pinpoint street-level information such as traffic jams and accidents through brain signal data – which is one reason why so many UTSW scientists are eager to integrate the MEG into their research.
For instance, the landmark Dallas Heart Study (DHS) is incorporating MEG data in its third phase, which has about 1,500 participants who agreed to undergo a bevy of scans, including MEG, to probe the link among certain cardiovascular risk factors, aging, and cognitive function. Launched in 2000, the DHS has generated more than two decades of valuable data related to heart health and has spawned at least 230 papers in medical journals advancing the diagnosis of cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and heart failure. The scope of the program was expanded in 2020, when it was renamed the Dallas Hearts and Minds Study, and investigators are hopeful its findings could lead to new discoveries related to dementia and other memory disorders.
MEG provides an extremely valuable method to precisely map brain networks and the effect of stimulation with exquisite spatial and physiological detail that is not available with any other brain mapping techniques.”
“We want to know how the MEG technology can be applied to studies in Alzheimer’s disease,” Dr. Davenport said. “There is a signal that we can see on MEG that we think is an early biomarker that appears before any symptoms. That’s a question Dr. Proskovec is working on: Can we use this data to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease? And, eventually, can it be used one day as a screening procedure?”
Nader Pouratian, M.D., Ph.D., Chair and Professor of Neurological Surgery, is investigating conditions such as treatment-resistant depression and movement disorders. He was recently awarded a grant of up to $5 million from the Raynor Cerebellum Project and is leading a team to develop neuromodulation therapies for disorders of the cerebellum, which controls muscles and motor movement, balance, and certain cognitive functions.
“Our ability to use brain stimulation to treat neurological and psychiatric disease has been severely limited by an incomplete understanding of how these diseases affect brain networks and how to precisely tune brain stimulation to repair those networks,” he said. “MEG provides an extremely valuable method to precisely map brain networks and the effect of stimulation with exquisite spatial and physiological detail that is not available with any other brain mapping techniques.”
Dr. Davenport is using MEG to lead a study on the brain activity of adolescent athletes with concussions. The aim is to deepen understanding of traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) and improve the standard of care for patients 17 and younger, who make up about 70% of emergency department visits for sports- and recreation-related TBIs and concussions, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“What we’re really interested in is getting these athletes in the MEG scanner within the first 72 hours of concussion because we think it’s going to be the most predictive of how they will heal. Better data will allow us to give a more precise prognosis, including when it will be safe for them to return to play and how they will respond to certain medications,” Dr. Davenport explained. “What sets us apart is we are one of the few to do this with pediatric patients, which means we’re working with a more vulnerable population. Their brains are still developing, which makes it a harder problem to address because there are more variables.”
Dr. Davenport and the MEG team are no strangers to firsts. Their reputation is growing nationally, and recently they were the first to employ a new brain-mapping software that featured an improved user interface, making the system and its data easier to navigate and access. UTSW was chosen to pilot the program because of the high number of patients the MEG team sees.
A world of difference for patients
While MEG technology is playing an ever-expanding role in the future of brain research, it is also delivering life-changing results for patients at UTSW right now. In just a few years, UT Southwestern has become a high-volume MEG center, providing presurgical brain models achieving accuracy rates over 90% and finding real-world solutions for people with intractable epilepsy.
Aarush Gotur, the 17-year-old who just a few years ago was experiencing up to 25 seizures a day, described himself as a “professional” patient. Diagnosed with epilepsy at age 7, he spent nearly half his life struggling with “brain freezes” that would render him unresponsive but still aware of his surroundings. He had endured countless doctor appointments and an alphabet soup of neuroimaging procedures: EEG, fMRI, and SPECT. Even with several anti-seizure medications, his symptoms persisted and worsened as he grew older.
The Goturs eventually sought help from Rana Said, M.D., Professor of Pediatrics and Neurology and Director of Pediatric Neurology Education at UT Southwestern, whose combined network at UTSW and Children’s Health could offer more support than any private practice.
Dr. Said suggested a MEG scan, which marked “the turning point in the whole treatment plan,” said Hitha Gotur, Aarush’s mother.
“Aarush had seizures that were clearly focal onset, and they came with a stereotypical aura. Despite this, he had MRIs at high resolutions that did not show a lesion,” Dr. Said explained. “This is what prompted my recommendation to obtain a MEG scan.”
“We decided to do it because it was noninvasive, and we were hopeful it would tell us something about the root cause of his condition,” Mrs. Gotur said. “We tried so many other scans and we just wanted something to give us real results.”
On that front, the MEG delivered. In spring 2023, Aarush checked in at UTSW’s Department of Radiology and was led down a winding hall where the MEG machine is set up in a small room constructed with walls made of a specially manufactured metal alloy. Staff ensured the necessary sensors were in place before closing the door to block out noise and prevent signal interference.
Aarush doesn’t remember much from the quiet procedure, but he recalls how the resulting MEG brain model prompted the identification of something strange on the left side of his frontal lobe on his MRI: focal cortical dysplasia, a congenital condition that affects the development of the cortex and is the most common cause of drug-resistant epilepsy identified in children.
“There was just a feeling of relief, to be able to see the problem with my own eyes and know we found the cause,” Aarush said. “For me, MEG provided a breakthrough in identifying the origin of my epilepsy that was missed by several other scans for almost seven years. I am hoping this scan will help other drug-resistant epilepsy patients like me to identify and address the root cause of the issue sooner rather than later. I think it should be more universally accessible and included as a standard practice in diagnosing epilepsy.”
The tiny irregularity had gone undetected for years, but the discovery prompted doctors to perform a stereoelectroencephalography (SEEG) scan to confirm the MEG’s findings – which it did – and recommend ablation therapy to surgically destroy the abnormal tissue.
“The MEG also gives us ‘functional’ information,” Dr. Talai said. “We tested where his language center is, so we could make sure to avoid injuring his speech abilities.”
Ultimately, it helped to effectively end an eight-year health struggle.
“It’s been amazing,” Aarush said. “I’m still taking medication, but I haven’t had a single seizure since 2023. The biggest change I’ve noticed is a jump in my energy level.”
“We are so blessed to have had the right doctors and the access to the right tests and treatment,” Mrs. Gotur added. “There are so many parents who are going through similar situations with their children, and some aren’t even aware of the options available. For us, it was very fortunate that UT Southwestern launched the MEG center when it did, and we were able to go through that process and get to where we are today.”
That’s the value of MEG, Dr. Talai said. It is part of an arsenal of resources available at UT Southwestern that gives hope back to people who thought they had none.
“We treat patients with seizures who cannot control them and are not responding to medication,” Dr. Talai said. “We’re talking about brain surgery, and when it comes down to it, we want to have the most accurate, the most precise, and the most detailed information possible to ensure the best outcome. For patients like Aarush, the MEG’s capabilities and our team’s expertise can make all the difference in the world.”
And for physicians and researchers at UTSW, the possibilities for the MEG seem limitless.
“We have many scientists who recognize the potential of MEG to bolster their research,” Dr. Davenport said. “Essentially, this imaging technique can be used to investigate any question related to the brain.”
Dr. Maldjian holds the Lee R. and Charlene B. Raymond Distinguished Chair in Brain Research. Dr. Pouratian holds the Lois C. A. and Darwin E. Smith Distinguished Chair in Neurological Surgery. Drs. Davenport, Pouratian, and Proskovec are Investigators in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute.
About UT Southwestern Medical Center
UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 24 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 23 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 140,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5.1 million outpatient visits a year.