Dr Ali Alim-Marvasti details
Location:
- University College Hospital
- National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery
GMC/GDC number:
7045886
Professional background
Dr Alim-Marvasti studied medicine at Cambridge, obtaining a double first class, later went on an exchange to MIT in Massachusetts, USA, and subsequently completed his neurology training in London at both Imperial College Healthcare NHS Hospitals (three years) and NHNN, Queen Square (two years).
Dr Marvasti is a consultant neurologist at the Neurology Same Day Emergency Care (Neuro-SDEC) service at University College Hospital, with expertise in acute neurological presentations, epilepsy, and general neurology. He was instrumental in establishing the Neuro-SDEC model in the emergency department since its inception in 2021. He has been an honorary and later substantive consultant at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery (NHNN), Queen Square, since 2018.
Dr Marvasti also works as a general neurologist and sees patients with complex epilepsy as well as first seizure at the Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Trust, where he runs inter-trust complex epilepsy MDTs, adult-transition clinics for individuals with complex paediatric epilepsy, and provides inpatient outreach.
Research interests
Dr Marvasti is interested in AI and machine learning algorithms as clinical decision support in acute neurological presentations and research in drug resistant epilepsy.
He authored the AI subsection in the “Neurology, A Queen Square Textbook” (2024) and in the “Queen Square Textbook of Epilepsy” (2026).
In 2022, Dr Marvasti was awarded a PhD in machine learning applications to epilepsy surgery from UCL. This was jointly funded by the Wellcome Trust and EPSRC as part of clinical and engineering collaboration. His research applied Bayesian methods to seizure semiology and he co-wrote code for an open-source software that displays 3D probabilistic cortical heatmaps of the likely source of seizures in the brain. His works were awarded various prizes from first-place at the British Chapter of the International League Against Epilepsy, to runner-up prize at the UCL Doctoral School. He has contributed to two textbooks, numerous publications and conference platform presentations including at the Association of British Neurologists and American Epilepsy Society.
He has a technical interest in data and coding, including in python, R, and MATLAB, with a deep understanding of the statistical techniques and machine learning methods that he applies.
Publications
- Prospective Evaluation of the Neurology Same Day Emergency Care (NeuroSDEC) Model in Secondary Care: data from 931 patients over the first 12 months (9 April, 2026), BMJ Neurology Open, Alim-Marvasti and Balaratnam et al
- Queen Square Textbook of Epilepsy (2026), Contributor
- A Case of Blurred Vision (2025), Practical Neurology, Sashini Mariathasan, Hadi Manji, Ali Alim-Marvasti
- Neurology, A Queen Square Textbook (2024), Chapter 10: Epilepsy and Related Disorders, Author of section on AI in Epilepsy
- Subjective brain fog: a four-dimensional characterization in 25,796 participants (2024), Frontiers in human neuroscience, Alim-Marvasti et al
- Value of semiology in predicting epileptogenic zone and surgical outcome following frontal lobe epilepsy surgery (2023), Seizure, Khoo and Alim-Marvasti et al
- Hierarchical clustering of prolonged post-concussive symptoms after 12 months: symptom-centric analysis and association with functional impairments (2022), Brain inury, Alim-Marvasti et al
- Probabilistic Landscape of Seizure Semiology Localising Values (2022), Brain Communications, Alim-Marvasti et al
- Multimodal prognostic features of seizure-freedom in epilepsy surgery (2022), JNNP, Alim-Marvasti et al
- Machine Learning for Localising Epileptogenic-Zone in the Temporal Lobe: Quantifying the Value of Multimodal Clinical-Semiology and Imaging Concordance (2021), Frontiers in Digital Health, Alim-Marvasti et al
- Transient Smartphone “Blindness” (2016), New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), Alim-Marvasti et al