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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Neurol.
Sec. Applied Neuroimaging
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fneur.2025.1538598
This article is part of the Research Topic Applied Neuroimaging for the Diagnosis and Prognosis of Cerebrovascular Disease View all 5 articles

Small-vessel-disease-induced white matter damage in occipital lobe epilepsy

Provisionally accepted
Jinseung Kim Jinseung Kim 1Dong Ah Lee Dong Ah Lee 2Ho-Joon Lee Ho-Joon Lee 2Kang Min Park Kang Min Park 2*
  • 1 Inje University Busan Paik Hospital, Busan, Republic of Korea
  • 2 Inje University Haeundae Paik Hospital, Busan, Republic of Korea

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Background: Peak width of skeletonized mean diffusivity (PSMD) is a novel marker of small vessel disease.This study aimed to investigate the presence of small vessel disease in patients with occipital lobe epilepsy (OLE) using PSMD.We enrolled 27 patients newly diagnosed with OLE and included 29 healthy controls. The age and sex of the patients and controls were comparable. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) was performed using a 3 T MRI scanner. We measured the PSMD based on DTI in several steps, including preprocessing, skeletonization, application of a custom mask, and histogram analysis, using the FSL program. We compared PSMD between patients with OLE and healthy controls. Additionally, we performed a correlation analysis between PSMD and clinical factors in patients with OLE.Results: Our findings revealed that the patients with OLE exhibited higher PSMD compared to healthy controls (2.459 vs. 2.079×10-4 mm2/s, p<0.001). In addition, PSMD positively correlated with age (r=0.412, p=0.032).However, the PSMD of the patients with OLE was not associated with other clinical factors such as age at seizure onset and duration of epilepsy.We demonstrated that patients with OLE had a higher PSMD than healthy controls, indicating evidence of small vessel disease in patients with OLE. This finding also highlights the potential of PSMD as a marker for detecting small vessel diseases in epileptic disorders.

    Keywords: Epilepsy, Diffusion Tensor Imaging, Cerebral Small Vessel Diseases, white matter, Neuroimaging

    Received: 03 Dec 2024; Accepted: 29 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Kim, Lee, Lee and Park. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Kang Min Park, Inje University Haeundae Paik Hospital, Busan, Republic of Korea

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