Integration of Multimodal Neuroimaging and Electroencephalography for the Study of Acute Epileptiform Activity After Traumatic Brain Injury

Abstract

Abstract. The integration of multidimensional, longitudinal data acquired using the combined use of structural neuroimaging [e.g. magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT)] and neurophysiological recordings [e.g. electroencephalography (EEG)] poses substantial challenges to neuroinformaticians and to biomedical scientists who interact frequently with such data. In traumatic brain injury (TBI) studies, this challenge is even more severe due to the substantial heterogeneity of TBIs across patients and to the variety of neurophysiological responses to injury. Additionally, the study of acute epileptiform activity prompted by TBI poses logistic, analytic and data integration difficulties. Here we describe our proposed solutions to the integration of structural neuroimaging with neurophysiological recordings to study epileptiform activity after TBI. Based on techniques for TBI-robust segmentation and electrical activity localization, we have developed an approach to the joint analysis of MRI/CT/EEG data to identify the foci of seizure-related activity and to facilitate the study of TBI-related neuropathophysiology.

Traumatic brain injury alters the relationship between brain structure and episodic memory

“…Although measurement variability in cortical thickness across different scanners with the same field strength has been reported as low (Han et al, 2006), we mitigated such effects by including scanner site as covariate in our analysis. Another limitation is that although semi-automated approaches, such as those used here, have been established as highly reliable and precise in estimating cortical metrics in healthy individuals (Iscan et al, 2015;Liem et al, 2015), the presence of gross structural injuries can cause inaccuracies in cortical thickness estimations (Irimia et al, 2014). In our study, individuals with focal lesions were also included and therefore we ensured that visual inspections were carefully carried out and any errors (e.g., pial surface errors) were manually corrected.…”