Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) analysis to characterize structural damages in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy

Abstract

Epilepsy is characterized by the repetition of epileptic seizures associated with differentetiological substrates, excluding symptomatic seizures caused by acute brain lesions, such ascollisions that cause momentary injuries to the brain or by metabolic derangements such as feversand drug use. The epileptic seizures present variable semiology depending on the surroundingcortical region and they may be localized (focal) or diffuse (generalized). The most commonsubtype of focal epilepsy is mesial Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (mTLE). Daily life aspects of peoplewith epilepsy are affected by comorbidities that impair cognition and social relationships.Besides it is common knowledge that symptoms of mTLE are not necessarily focal, thecognitive impairment caused by this type of epilepsy is little known. The dysfunction of the"resting" brain (the Resting State Network [RSN]), which includes a series of networks that arefunctionally connected, may play a role in the genesis of cognitive or psychiatric complications.This hypothesis continues to be speculative, and new clinical studies are needed to access apossible correlation between the severity of cognitive damages in patients with mTLE and theinjury of RSN.The DTI analysis provides inferences of the microstructure of the white matternoninvasively, by measuring the anisotropic diffusion of water from the tracts. The informationmeasured by DTI may be a signalisation of functional, clinical and behavioural dysfunctions. Thepresent project will seek using functional (resting state networks) and structural (DTI) magneticresonance images to analyse possible correlations between these and the course of cognitiveimpairment common in patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy.