INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Almost 3.5 million people in the United States suffer from epilepsy.

For some, these seizures can be controlled with medication, while others will need brain surgery, which can be very risky.

But now, new technology is helping doctors pinpoint what’s causing the seizures better than ever before.

Gabriela Sable first started experiencing signs of epilepsy when she was just 11 – not long after, seizures started.

“I’d be walking to a place and not really sure how I had gotten there,” she said. “People’s parents actually went to the school and told the school that they didn’t want me to hang out with their kids.”

Multiple hospitalizations and MRIs could not pinpoint what was causing Sable’s seizures, until Cleveland Clinic epileptologists determined there was a lesion somewhere on her frontal lobe.

Dr. Elia Pestana Knight with Cleveland Clinic said that they knew Sable’s lesion was somewhere on her frontal lobe, but it was too tiny to know exactly where.

“Some patients have very small malformations that we cannot see,” she said. “We cannot simply remove the whole frontal lobe. Those are her dominant lobes for her language and for her ability to write and comprehend the spoken language.”

The most common MRI used for diagnosis is something called the 3 Tesla, which is the size of a magnet. But now, there’s a more powerful 7 Tesla MRI, which was able to determine exactly where Sable’s lesion was.

Pestana Knight says the lesion was far from Sable’s lesion was far from the language areas of her brain. Doctors were able to perform a robotic laser ablation therapy to remove the lesion.

Now, Sable is seizure-free and doing all the things she was never able to do before, including hiking Peru’s Machu Picchu.

This story was created from a script aired on WISH-TV. Health Spotlight is presented by Community Health Network.