TLE lateralization using whole brain structural connectivity.

A prerequisite of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) surgery is to lateralize the disease. Recent studies have shown the capability of diffusion weighted MRI (DWMRI) in lateralizing TLE patients. This has been achieved by analyzing diffusion parameters of specific white matter tracts or regions known to be involved in the disease; however, other brain regions and connections have not been investigated for TLE lateralization. Whole brain structural connectivity using DWMRI provides a wealth of information regarding the structural connections in the brain. This information can be explored to find the most effective connections for TLE lateralization. In this work, we investigate the connectivity matrices calculated from DWMRI of 10 left and 10 right TLE patients to find the most effective connections for lateralizing the disease. Linear support vector machine (LSVM) classifier and leave-one-out cross validation scheme are used to estimate classification performance of the connectivity feature subsets. A subset of three connections with 100% classification accuracy is found. The corresponding LSVM classifier may be used to lateralize prospective TLE patients.