The Multicentre Epilepsy Lesion Detection project (MELD) used more than a thousand patient MRI scans from 22 epilepsy centres around the world to develop the algorithm, which provides reports of where abnormalities are in cases of drug-resistant focal cortical dysplasia (FCD) – a leading cause of epilepsy.

FCDs are areas of the brain that have developed abnormally and often cause drug-resistant epilepsy. Doctors typically treat the condition with surgery, but identifying the lesions from an MRI is an ongoing challenge for clinicians, as FCDs can look normal in scans.

When developing the algorithm, the team, led by University College London (UCL), quantified cortical features from the MRI scans, such as how thick or folded the cortex/brain surface is, and used around 300,000 locations across the brain.

Researchers then trained the algorithm on examples labelled by expert radiologists as either being a healthy brain or having FCD – dependent on their patterns...