Ongoing Pediatric Epilepsy Research Consortium Initiatives and the Future of Pediatric Epilepsy Care: Anup Patel, MD

WATCH TIME: 3 minutes

“This is where we’re really going to learn how large language models and augmented intelligence can inform care trajectories in a meaningful way. If we can use these tools to identify missed diagnoses and better understand treatment patterns, the ultimate goal is improving outcomes for kids who might otherwise fall through the cracks.”

The Pediatric Epilepsy Research Consortium (PERC) is a collaborative network of pediatric epilepsy centers dedicated to advancing research, improving clinical care, and accelerating therapeutic development for children with epilepsy. By bringing together clinicians, researchers, and institutions across the United States and beyond, PERC has played a central role in facilitating multicenter studies, developing disease-specific registries, and creating infrastructure to better understand rare and complex pediatric epilepsy syndromes.

Through its growing portfolio of initiatives, PERC has increasingly focused on identifying gaps in diagnosis and treatment, particularly in severe and often underrecognized conditions such as Lennox-Gastaut syndrome and pediatric status epilepticus. Recent efforts have also expanded into the use of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence and large language models, to analyze clinical data at scale, improve case identification, and better understand treatment patterns and outcomes across diverse care settings.

At the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) Annual Meeting 2026, Anup Patel, MD, associate chief quality officer at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and professor at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, discussed several of these ongoing initiatives. Among them are newly funded pilot grants exploring the use of large language models to detect missed diagnoses of Lennox-Gastaut syndrome and to characterize real-world care trajectories in pediatric status epilepticus across multiple institutions.

In a conversation with NeurologyLive^®, Patel outlines how PERC’s collaborative structure enables these types of innovative, multicenter projects and reflects on the broader role of the organization in shaping the future of pediatric epilepsy care. He also discusses how advances in augmented intelligence and digital health tools are beginning to influence both research and clinical practice within the epilepsy community.

Click here for more AAN 2026 coverage.