Maher Christina, D'Souza Arkiev, Zeng Rui, Barnett Michael, Kavehei Omid, Nikpour Armin, Wang Chenyu
School of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Brain and Mind Centre, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Front Neurol. 2022 Sep 14;13:972590. doi: 10.3389/fneur.2022.972590. eCollection 2022.
We examined the white matter of patients with and without focal to bilateral tonic-clonic seizures (FBTCS), and control participants. A neural network based tract segmentation model (Tractseg) was used to isolate tract-specific, track-weighted tensor-based measurements from the tracts of interest. We compared the group differences in the track-weighted tensor-based measurements derived from whole and hemispheric tracts. We identified several regions that displayed significantly altered white matter in patients with focal epilepsy compared to controls. Furthermore, patients without FBTCS showed significantly increased white matter disruption in the inferior fronto-occipital fascicle and the striato-occipital tract. In contrast, the track-weighted tensor-based measurements from the FBTCS cohort exhibited a stronger resemblance to the healthy controls (compared to the non-FBTCS group). Our findings revealed marked alterations in a range of subcortical tracts considered critical in the genesis of seizures in focal epilepsy. Our novel application of tract-specific, track-weighted tensor-based measurements to a new clinical dataset aided the elucidation of specific tracts that may act as a predictive biomarker to distinguish patients likely to develop FBTCS.
我们对有和没有局灶性至双侧强直阵挛发作（FBTCS）的患者以及对照参与者的白质进行了检查。使用基于神经网络的束分割模型（Tractseg）从感兴趣的束中分离出特定束、基于轨迹加权张量的测量值。我们比较了从全脑和半球束得出的基于轨迹加权张量的测量值中的组间差异。我们确定了几个与对照组相比在局灶性癫痫患者中显示白质明显改变的区域。此外，没有FBTCS的患者在额枕下束和纹状体枕束中显示出明显增加的白质破坏。相比之下，FBTCS队列中基于轨迹加权张量的测量值与健康对照组的相似性更强（与非FBTCS组相比）。我们的研究结果揭示了在局灶性癫痫发作发生中被认为至关重要的一系列皮质下束的明显改变。我们将特定束、基于轨迹加权张量的测量值新应用于一个新的临床数据集，有助于阐明可能作为预测生物标志物以区分可能发生FBTCS的患者的特定束。
