This study aims to determine the salient brain regions with abnormal changes in white matter structures from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) images of the patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), and to discriminate the patients with TLE from normal controls (NCs). Firstly, the DTI images from 50 subjects (28 NCs and 22 TLE) were acquired. Secondly, the four measures including the fractional anisotropy (FA), the mean diffusivity (MD), the axial diffusivity (AD) and the radial diffusivity (RD) were calculated. Thirdly, the tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS) was adopted to extract the measures in brain regions with significant differences between the two compared groups. Fourthly, the obtained measures were used as input features of the support vector machine (SVM) for classification, and the support vector machine-recursive feature elimination (SVM-RFE) was compared with the support vector machine-tract-based spatial statistics (SVM-TBSS) method. Finally, the essential brain regions and their spatial distribution were analyzed and discussed. The experimental results showed that the FA measures of the TLE group decreased significantly in the corpus callosum, superior longitudinal fasciculus, corona radiata, external capsule, internal capsule, inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus, fasciculus uncinatus and sagittal stratum, which were nearly bilaterally distributed, while the MD and RD increased significantly in most of these brain regions of the TLE group. Although the AD also increased, the differences were not statistically significant. The SVM-TBSS classifier obtained accuracies of 82%, 76% and 76% using the FA, MD and RD for classification, respectively, and 80% using combined measures. The SVM-RFE classifier obtained accuracies of 90%, 90% and 92% using the FA, MD and RD respectively, while the highest accuracy was 100% using combined measures. These results demonstrated that the SVM-RFE outperformed the SVM-TBSS, and the dominant characteristic influencing classification in brain regions were in associative and commissural fibers. These results illustrated that the measures of DTI images could reveal the abnormal changes in white matter structure of patients with TLE, providing effective information to clarify its pathological mechanism, localize the focus and diagnose automatically.
Objective To explore the preventive effectiveness of early physiotherapy on arm lymphedema after modified radical mastectomy for breast cancer. Methods A total of 206 patients who underwent modified radical mastectomy for breast cancer in The First Affiliated Hospital of Henan University from June 2014 to June 2016, enrolled in this randomized controlled clinical trial. Then these patients were randomly divided into intervention group and control group equally. Patients in the control group received routine treatment, and the patients in the intervention group began to use the air pressure pump combined with the microwave physiotherapy on the second day after the radical surgery. The incidences of limb lymphedema in 6 months and 1 year after operation between the 2 groups were compared, and the influencing factors of arm lymphedema were explored. Results The clinical data of 195 patients were analyzed at end, including 99 patients of the intervention group and 96 patients of the control group. ① There were statistical significance in the incidences of arm lymphedema in 6 months and 1 year after operation between the 2 groups (P<0.05), that incidences of arm lymphedema in the intervention group were both lower than those of the control group at the2 time points [6 months after operation: 2.0% (2/99)vs. 9.4% (9/96); 1 year after operation: 5.1% (5/99) vs. 17.7% (17/96)]. ② The results of non-conditional logistic regression analysis shown that, age (OR=1.45, P=0.008), tumor location (OR=1.72, P<0.001), TNM stage (OR=2.01, P=0.033), the number of invasive axillary lymph nodes (OR=1.15, P=0.005), and postoperative radiotherapy (OR=1.23, P=0.016) were the influencing factors of arm lymphedema after modified radical mastectomy for breast cancer, patients with age older than 60 years, tumor position at the outside area, stage Ⅲ of TNM, the number of invasive axillary lymph nodes >5, and patients received radiotherapy after operation had high risk of arm lymphedema. Conclusion Early physiotherapy can effectively prevent the occurrence of arm lymphedema after modified radical mastectomy for breast cancer, and early physiotherapy should be performed for patients with high risk of arm lymphedema.