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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Gerard HallORCiD, Dr Sarah Gascoigne, Dr Jonathan Horsley, Professor Yujiang WangORCiD, Csaba Kozma, Professor Peter TaylorORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2025 The Author(s). Non-invasive neuroimaging is important in epilepsy to help identify cerebral abnormalities. Abnormally reduced fractional anisotropy (FA) in deep white matter (WM) from diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is widely reported in large multi-cohort studies across all types of epilepsies. However, abnormalities in FA for superficial WM are rarely investigated in epilepsy. To gain a greater understanding of the nature of WM abnormality at different WM depths, we investigated DWI abnormalities at a range of superficial and deep WM in two separate temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) cohorts. The first cohort (TLE = 81, Healthy Control; HC = 67) underwent a high angular resolution multi-shell DWI, whilst the second cohort (TLE = 70, HC = 29) had a single-shell acquisition. We registered FA maps to a standard template, and analysed temporal WM within 8 mm of the temporal lobe grey matter, amygdala and hippocampus. We standardised FA measures at different depths, and compared ipsi-versus contralateral temporal WM, and MRI-positive versus MRI-negative groups. We report three major findings: First, superficial WM had greater FA reductions than deep WM in TLE (P < 0.001). Second, this effect was more prominent in the ipsilateral than contralateral temporal lobe WM (P < 0.001). Third, these effects were present to a similar degree in patients who reported an MRI negative. All results are held in both TLE cohorts. These findings suggest that, in the temporal lobe, superficial WM is more abnormal than deep WM in TLE, with potential clinical use for lateralisation even in MRI-negative patients. These findings motivate further investigation of the importance of superficial WM in epilepsy.
Author(s): Hall GR, Gascoigne SJ, Horsley JJ, Wang Y, Kozma C, De Tisi J, Vos SB, Winston GP, Duncan JS, Taylor PN
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Brain Communications
Year: 2025
Volume: 7
Issue: 5
Online publication date: 19/08/2025
Acceptance date: 15/08/2025
Date deposited: 16/09/2025
ISSN (electronic): 2632-1297
Publisher: Oxford University Press
URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/braincomms/fcaf305
DOI: 10.1093/braincomms/fcaf305
Data Access Statement: T1w scans and associated metadata are available as part of a previously published database [https://doi.org/10.1111/epi.18192]. Diffusion-weighted scans will be made available in a future data release. Code for the analysis is available at the following location: https://github.com/cnnp-lab/SWM/.
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