BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Tuberous sclerosis complex disease is a rare, multisystem genetic disease, but appropriate drug treatment allows many pediatric patients to have positive outcomes. The purpose of this study was to predict the effectiveness of antiseizure medication treatment in children with tuberous sclerosis complex–related epilepsy. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We conducted a retrospective study involving 300 children with tuberous sclerosis complex–related epilepsy. The study included the analysis of clinical data and T2WI and FLAIR images. The clinical data consisted of sex, age of onset, age at imaging, infantile spasms, and antiseizure medication numbers. To forecast antiseizure medication treatment, we developed a multitechnique deep learning method called WAE-Net. This method used multicontrast MR imaging and clinical data. The T2WI and FLAIR images were combined as FLAIR3 to enhance the contrast between tuberous sclerosis complex lesions and normal brain tissues. We trained a clinical data-based model using a fully connected network with the above-mentioned variables. After that, a weighted-average ensemble network built from the ResNet3D architecture was created as the final model. RESULTS: The experiments had shown that age of onset, age at imaging, infantile spasms, and antiseizure medication numbers were significantly different between the 2 drug-treatment outcomes (P < .05). The hybrid technique of FLAIR3 could accurately localize tuberous sclerosis complex lesions, and the proposed method achieved the best performance (area under the curve = 0.908 and accuracy of 0.847) in the testing cohort among the compared methods. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed method could predict antiseizure medication treatment of children with rare tuberous sclerosis complex–related epilepsy and could be a strong baseline for future studies.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Highly predictive markers of drug treatment outcomes of tuberous sclerosis complex–related epilepsy are a key unmet clinical need. The objective of this study was to identify meaningful clinical and radiomic predictors of outcomes of epilepsy drug treatment in patients with tuberous sclerosis complex. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A total of 105 children with tuberous sclerosis complex–related epilepsy were enrolled in this retrospective study. The pretreatment baseline predictors that were used to predict drug treatment outcomes included patient demographic and clinical information, gene data, electroencephalogram data, and radiomic features that were extracted from pretreatment MR imaging scans. The Spearman correlation coefficient and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator were calculated to select the most relevant features for the drug treatment outcome to build a comprehensive model with radiomic and clinical features for clinical application. RESULTS: Four MR imaging–based radiomic features and 5 key clinical features were selected to predict the drug treatment outcome. Good discriminative performances were achieved in testing cohorts (area under the curve = 0.85, accuracy = 80.0%, sensitivity = 0.75, and specificity = 0.83) for the epilepsy drug treatment outcome. The model of radiomic and clinical features resulted in favorable calibration curves in all cohorts. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggested that the radiomic and clinical features model may predict the epilepsy drug treatment outcome. Age of onset, infantile spasms, antiseizure medication numbers, epileptiform discharge in left parieto-occipital area of electroencephalography, and gene mutation type are the key clinical factors to predict the epilepsy drug treatment outcome. The texture and first-order statistic features are the most valuable radiomic features for predicting drug treatment outcomes.

We read with great interest the cohort study of children with epilepsy that was recently published by Zou et al.¹ The authors recruited 320 paediatric epilepsy patients between October 2016 and December 2017 and performed genome sequencing on probands. They analysed genome sequencing data with comprehensive pedigree and clinical data and concluded that genome sequencing should be the first choice for genetic testing in epilepsy patients. We agree that the application of genome sequencing in children with epilepsy will lead to accurate interpretation of genetic testing and thus benefit therapeutic decision-making and precision medicine. However, there are several methods and strategies to applying next-generation sequencing for clinical diagnostics, which vary in the type of sequencing regions and cost. According to the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics guidelines, trio-based genetic analysis of the proband and both biological parents is important in determining if a variant is inherited or if it is de novo and thus affects variant classification and identification.² Hence, our group retrospectively reviewed and analysed paediatric epilepsy patients who underwent diagnostic trio-based clinical genetic testing at Shenzhen Children’s Hospital between September 2019 and June 2020. A total of 355 cases were included; 168 of the patients and their parents underwent whole-exome sequencing (WES), 48 patients and their parents underwent whole genome sequencing (WGS) and 139 patients underwent WGS while their parents underwent WES. We systematically reviewed detailed clinical records of patients in all groups. We evaluated the clinical characteristics that were associated with a positive genetic diagnosis and assessed the potential impact of the genetic diagnosis on management strategy.

Compressed Sensing (CS) and parallel imaging are two promising techniques that accelerate the MRI acquisition process. Combining these two techniques is of great interest due to the complementary information used in each. In this study, we proposed a novel reconstruction framework that effectively combined compressed sensing and nonlinear parallel imaging technique for dynamic cardiac imaging. Specifically, the proposed method decouples the reconstruction process into two sequential steps: In the first step, a series of aliased dynamic images were reconstructed from the highly undersampled k-space data using compressed sensing; In the second step, nonlinear parallel imaging technique, i.e. nonlinear GRAPPA, was utilized to reconstruct the original dynamic images from the reconstructed k-space data obtained from the first step. In addition, we also proposed a tailored k-space down-sampling scheme that satisfies both the incoherent undersampling requirement for CS and the structured undersampling requirement for nonlinear parallel imaging. The proposed method was validated using four in vivo experiments of dynamic cardiac cine MRI with retrospective undersampling. Experimental results showed that the proposed method is superior at reducing aliasing artifacts and preserving the spatial details and temporal variations, compared with the competing k-t FOCUSS and k-t FOCUSS with sensitivity encoding methods, with the same numbers of measurements.

Multi-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is wildly applied to identify tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC) children in a clinic. In this work, a deep convolutional neural network with multi-contrast MRI is proposed to diagnose pediatric TSC. Firstly, by combining T2W and FLAIR images, a new synthesis modality named FLAIR₃ was created to enhance the contrast between TSC lesions and normal brain tissues. After that, a deep weighted fusion network (DWF-net) using a late fusion strategy is proposed to diagnose TSC children. In experiments, a total of 680 children were enrolled, including 331 healthy children and 349 TSC children. The experimental results indicate that FLAIR₃ successfully enhances the visibility of TSC lesions and improves the classification performance. Additionally, the proposed DWF-net delivers a superior classification performance compared to previous methods, achieving an AUC of 0.998 and an accuracy of 0.985. The proposed method has the potential to be a reliable computer-aided diagnostic tool for assisting radiologists in diagnosing TSC children.