Nine-year-old girl becomes first Aussie to receive revolutionary epilepsy procedure

Australian doctors are hopeful a groundbreaking new treatment has "fixed" a young girl's severe epilepsy, in what could be a major medical breakthrough for the neurological disorder.

Nine-year-old Aisha was trapped by a debilitating form of drug-resistant epilepsy, triggered by a brain tumour when she was three.

She was suffering up to 13 seizures a day, which mum Marwa said was "keeping her up majority of the night".

READ MORE: Expectant mums uneasy as Central Coast set to lose only private maternity ward

"They were very bad ... she was just non-existent, you could practically say, during the day," Marwa said.

Some 250,000 Australians live with epilepsy, but for patients like Aisha, there have been limited treatment options until now.

Aisha endured two gruelling operations where surgeons opened her skull and cut deep into her brain to remove the seizure-causing cells, potentially damaging healthy ones.

Both surgeries were unsuccessful, but a revolutionary new treatment offered hope.

Laser interstitial thermal therapy (LITT) has been successfully treating epilepsy and brain tumours overseas, and has just started being performed here in Australia.

It works by inserting a tiny laser catheter through the skull, precisely guided with MRI to target the abnormal brain tissue, which is then destroyed using heat from the laser beams.

Aisha was the first child to be treated with the method in the southern hemisphere, with Westmead Children's Hospital head of neurosurgery Mark Dexter taking the lead.

"It's absolutely the most amazing thing I've been involved in in my practising career," Dexter said.

"It transforms lives of children - kids sometimes having 30 or 40 seizures a day become seizure-free, home the next day, back to school three days later."

READ MORE: 'We're still here': Controversial Block couple make a comeback ahead of Sunday's auction

Of the five children and 10 adults treated so far, all are completely seizure-free.

That includes Aisha, who is now three months post-surgery and "flourishing", according to mum Marwa.

"She's just a different person. She's starting to do things that she wasn't able to do," Marwa said.

"We're pretty confident that she's fixed for good," Dexter said.

NSW Health Minister Ryan Park wants LITT rolled out across the country.

"What I hope this results in is more of these types of treatments, particularly for these types of conditioning very relentless conditions that have huge impacts, on particularly the lives of young people," Park said.