Predicting Antiseizure Medication Treatment in Children with Rare Tuberous Sclerosis Complex-Related Epilepsy Using Deep Learning.

background and purposeTuberous 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

methodsWe 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.

resultsThe 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 (

conclusionsThe 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.