Matthew Stern ^1* Ray Dingledine ¹ Robert E. Gross ^1,2 Ken Berglund ^1*

• ¹ School of Medicine, Emory University, Atlanta, United States
• ² Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States

Despite an abundance of pharmacologic and surgical epilepsy treatments, there remain millions of patients suffering from poorly controlled seizures. One approach to closing this treatment gap may be found through a deeper mechanistic understanding of the network alterations that underly this aberrant activity. Functional optical imaging in vertebrate models provides powerful advantages to this end, enabling the spatiotemporal acquisition of individual neuron activity patterns across multiple seizures. This coupled with the advent of genetically encoded indicators, be them for specific ions, neurotransmitters or voltage, grants researchers unparalleled access to the intact nervous system. Here we will review how in vivo functional optical imaging in various vertebrate seizure models has advanced our knowledge of seizure dynamics, principally seizure initiation, propagation and termination.