The relevance of skull density ratio in selecting candidates for transcranial MR-guided focused ultrasound
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Transcranial MR-guided focused ultrasound (MRgFUS) is a minimally invasive treatment for movement disorders. Considerable interpatient variability in skull transmission efficiency exists with the current clinical devices, which is thought to be dependent on each patient's specific skull morphology. Lower skull density ratio (SDR) values are thought to impede acoustic energy transmission across the skull, attenuating or preventing the therapeutic benefits of MRgFUS. Patients with SDR values below 0.4 have traditionally been deemed poor candidates for MRgFUS. Although considerable anecdotal evidence has suggested that SDR is a reliable determinant of procedural and clinical success, relationships between SDR and clinical outcomes have yet to be formally investigated. Moreover, as transcranial MRgFUS is becoming an increasingly widespread procedure, knowledge of SDR distribution in the general population may enable improved preoperative counseling and preparedness. METHODS: A total of 98 patients who underwent MRgFUS thalamotomy at the authors' institutions between 2012 and 2018 were analyzed (cohort 1). The authors retrospectively assessed the relationships between SDR and various clinical outcomes, including tremor improvement and adverse effects, as well as procedural factors such as sonication parameters. An SDR was also prospectively obtained in 163 random emergency department patients who required a head CT scan for various clinical indications (cohort 2). Patients' age and sex were used to explore relationships with SDR. RESULTS: In the MRgFUS treatment group, 17 patients with a thalamotomy lesion had an SDR below 0.4. Patients with lower SDRs required more sonication energy; however, their low SDR did not influence their clinical outcomes. In the emergency department patient group, about one-third of the patients had a low SDR (< 0.4). SDR did not correlate with age or sex. CONCLUSIONS: Although lower SDR values correlated with higher energy requirements during MRgFUS thalamotomy, within the range of this study population, the SDR did not appreciably impact or provide the ability to predict the resulting clinical outcomes. Sampling of the general population suggests that age and sex have no relationship with SDR. Other variables, such as local variances in bone density, should also be carefully reviewed to build a comprehensive appraisal of a patient's suitability for MRgFUS treatment.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".