Combined structural and functional MRI studies in epilepsy with medial temporal lobe epilepsy

Epilepsy is a common neurological disorder, and its electrophysiology characteristic is abnormally high excitability and synchronization of the neural activity. This thesis focus on the study of medial temporal lobe epilepsy with hippocampal sclerosis. Hippocampus plays an important role in short term memory. However little is known about the connectivity between hippocampal structures and adjacent brain regions. Three pairs of region of interests (ROIs) related to working memory from the result of BOLD-fMRI data are chosen. These ROIs are registrated from montreal neurological institute template (MNI) space to individual space and the fiber bundle between two ROIs are traced in the diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) images. The results show that the number of fiber bundle has reduced among these ROIs, such as left hippocampus and right hippocampus, left hippocampus and left thalamus, left hippocampus and left frontal lobe and so on. And the number of fiber bundle has increased among these ROIs, such as left thalamus and right thalamus, right hippocampus and right thalamus. And the FA value of the fiber bundles in some regions related to left hippocampus has been decreased. The cause of abnormal functional and structural connections due to the damage of hippocampus in Medial temporal lobe epilepsy (mTLE) patients is studied from a new perspective view.