Role of conventional magnetic resonance imaging in the screening of epilepsy with structural abnormalities: a pictorial essay.

Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disease with serious impact on patients and society. The causes of epilepsy comprise a heterogeneous group of disorders, rendering epilepsy diagnoses rather difficult and challenging. The primary role of MRI is to locate and define the probable anatomic epileptogenic lesions. In the developing countries, where functional MRI (fMRI) is not popular, conventional MRI (cMRI) becomes especially important in epilepsy diagnoses. Apart from that, an experienced radiologist can increase the diagnostic yield of MRI to epileptogenic lesions. Thus, we present a pictorial review focusing on the role of cMRI in the screening of epilepsy with structural abnormalities and highlighting the key findings on cMRI to help radiologists to be familiar with the characteristic findings. Considering the complexity and diversity of the structural abnormalities, we propse a mnemonic "MAGIC TVs" approach to reduce false negative diagnosis and improve the diagnosis rate.