Maeike Zijlmans

Maeike Zijlmans is a neurologist and principle investigator at the UMC Utrecht Brain Center and Stichting Epilepsie Instellingen Nederland (SEIN). She finished her PhD with honors in May 2011 (prof van Huffelen, Utrecht, and prof Gotman, Montreal). Her thesis is about new presurgical techniques to characterize the focus of epilepsy. These techniques included EEG-fMRI, magnetoencephalography (MEG), special EEG electrodes and 3 T MRI. She stayed at the Montreal Neurological Institute for one year where she studied the use of high frequency oscillations (HFOs) in depth EEG in presurgical epilepsy patients.  She applied the acquired knowledge at the UMC Utrecht to record HFOs with corticography during surgery. This work ultimately led to the conduct of a prospective randomized controlled trial 'the HFO trial' comparing the use of HFOs to spikes as electrical biomarkers for epileptic tissue during epilepsy surgery. Results are expected to be published in 2022. Another part of the thesis concerned quality of life and coping style in epilepsy.  In 2013 she started her work as clinical researcher. She is now leading the 'epilab' which focusses on advanced technologies to recognize epileptic brain tissue. Her research group consists of a post-doctoral fellow, 7 PhD students (+3 finished) and several master students. She obtained an ERC starting grant in 2019 for the project 'the Core and Effects of Epilepsy'. The group studies how to delineate epileptic brain tissue from healthy cortex with optimal signal recording and analysis in a large dataset of retrospectively gathered highly sampled intra-operative electrocorticography and by prospectively recording high denisity electrocorticography. The group is trying to improve the clinical yield of the HFO-signal using different signal analytic methods, like high frequent network analysis and machine learning. Her ultimate goal is to find a way to direct the neurosurgeon directly to the epileptogenic tissue. Also, the clinical yield is studied to predict cognitive outcome and to compare HFOs to other disease markers like in tumours. Part of the research group works on related issues like the non-invasive identification of HFOs with EEG and MEG, and finding alterative biomarkers with metabolic MRI. Allied research focuses on stress-related epilepsy, psychogenic non-epileptic seizures and effect of surgery on patient well being.

Research line

Advance diagnostics for epilepsy surgery

Most recent key publications

1: Zijlmans M, Zweiphenning WJEM, van Klink NEC. Changing concepts in presurgical assessment for epilepsy surgery. Nat Rev Neurol 2019;15:594-606.

2: van 't Klooster MA, van Klink NEC, Zweiphenning WJEM, Leijten FSS, Zelmann R, Ferrier CH, van Rijen PC, Otte WM, Braun KPJ, Huiskamp GJM, Zijlmans M. Tailoring epilepsy surgery with fast ripples in the intraoperative electrocorticogram. Ann Neurol. 2017 May;81(5):664-676

3: Zijlmans M, Jiruska P, Zelmann R, Leijten FS, Jefferys JG, Gotman J. High-frequency oscillations as a new biomarker in epilepsy. Ann Neurol. 2012 Feb;71(2):169-78.

4: Zijlmans M, Jacobs J, Zelmann R, Dubeau F, Gotman J. High-frequency oscillations mirror disease activity in patients with epilepsy. Neurology. 2009

5: Zijlmans M, Huiskamp G, Hersevoort M, Seppenwoolde JH, van Huffelen AC, Leijten FS. EEG-fMRI in the preoperative work-up for epilepsy surgery. Brain. 2007 Sep;130(Pt 9):2343-53.