Dr. Frans S.S. Leijten (1960) studied medicine at Utrecht University and obtained his MD in 1986. He became a neurologist and clinical neurophysiologist in 1994. In 1996 he defended his PhD thesis on critical illness polyneuropathy at Leiden University. He worked as an epileptologist at epilepsy center SEIN, then called Meer en Bosch, in Heemstede, from 1994-1996. Since then, he has been working at the University Medical Center Utrecht, where he was head of the EEG department and the monitoring unit for invasive EEG recordings. He was also chairman of the National Dutch Epilepsy Surgery Taskforce. He is a member of the European Childhood Epilepsy Surgery Group U-TASK, of the European Network for Epilepsy Research ENER and of the European Reference Network for rare and complex epilepsies EpiCare. He is a member of the Consilium Neurologicum, responsible for the education of neurology residents in the Netherlands. He has received various educational awards and is a well-known speaker at congresses.

Research line

His research focuses on intractable focal epilepsy and epilepsy surgery. His team explored the clinical use of new advanced neuroimaging methods, clinical decision-making in focal epilepsy, quality-of-life and coping issues in intractable epilepsy, and new treatments. He is engaged in a national collaboration which led to the develop a device to detect seizures during the night (Nightwatch). Recent research focuses on networks in the intracranial EEG measured on the cortex. Together with the department of Applied Mathematics of Twente University, he is engaged in developing a neural mass computer model that can represent the epileptic cortex of individual patients. For a demonstration tool, look at

https://wwwhome.ewi.utwente.nl/~meijerhge/resector_en.html .

Using epileptic network knowledge, he conducted a clinical trial of closed loop cortical stimulation in patients with intractable epilepsy in the primary sensorimotor cortex (REC2STIM). Dr Leijten has over 150 publications in peer-review journals and is the editor of a Dutch textbook on clinical epilepsy. 

Most recent key publications

1: Van Blooijs D, Van der Aar JF, Huiskamp GJM, Castegnaro G, Demuru M, Zweiphenning WJEM, Van Eijsden P, Miller KJ, Leijten FSS, Hermes D. Developmental trajectory of transmission speed in the human brain. Nat Neurosci 2023; 26:537-541.

2:  Guo J, Wang Z, Van ‘t Klooster MA, Van der Salm SMA, Leijten FSS, Braun KPJ, Zijlmans M. Seizure outcome after intraoperative electrocorticography-tailored epilepsy surgery A systematic review and meta-analysis. Neurology 2024 11;102(11):e209430. doi: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000209430.

3: Van Westrhenen A, Lazeron RHC, Van Dijk JP, Leijten FSS, Thijs RD. Multimodal nocturnal seizure detection in children with epilepsy: a prospective, multicenter, long-term, in-home trial. Epilepsia 2023; 64:2137-52.

4. Demuru M, Kalitzin S, Zweiphenning W, Van Blooijs D, Van ’t Klooster M,  Van Eijsden P, Leijten F, Zijlmans M, on behalf of the RESPECT group. The value of intra-operative electrographic biomarkers for tailoring during epilepsy surgery: from  group-level to patient-level analysis. Sci Rep 2020;10:14654.

5: Hebbink J, Huiskamp G, Van Gils SA, Leijten FSS, Meijer HGE. Pathological responses to single pulse electrical stimuli in epilepsy: the role of feedforward inhibition. Eur J Neurosci 2020;51:1122-36.

Education

2020 SKO (Senior Teaching Qualification)

1: 2020 ZonMW parel for best translational research

2: 2012 Editor's Choice of best publication in NeuroImage

3: 2012 Editor's Choice of best publication in Human Brain Mapping

4: 2009 SUMMA medical teacher of the year

5: 2004 VAANdrager national prize for best teacher in Neurology