Prediction of epilepsy development in traumatic brain injury patients from diffusion weighted MRI

Post-traumatic epilepsy (PTE) is a life-long complication of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and is a major public health problem that has an estimated incidence that ranges from 2% -- 50%, depending on the severity of the TBI. Currently, the patho-mechanism that induces epileptogenesis in TBI patients is unclear, and one of the most challenging goals in the epilepsy community is to predict which TBI patients will develop epilepsy. In this work, we used diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) of 14 TBI patients recruited in the Epilepsy Bioinformatics Study for Antiepileptogenic Therapy (EpiBioS4Rx) to measure and analyze fractional anisotropy (FA), obtained from tract-based spatial statistic (TBSS) analysis. Then we used these measurements to train two support vector machine (SVM) models to predict which TBI patients have developed epilepsy. Our approach, tested on these 14 patients with a leave-two-out cross-validation, allowed us to obtain an accuracy of 0.857 ± 0.18 (with a 95% level of confidence), demonstrating it to be potentially promising for the early characterization of PTE.