Thalamic Interictal Epileptic and Non-Epileptic Events during NREM Sleep in Patients with Focal Epilepsy: a Stereo-EEG Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Thalamic recordings are increasingly incorporated into stereo-electroencephalography (SEEG) evaluations of drug-resistant focal epilepsy to guide neuromodulation targeting. Human thalamic electrophysiology, however, is poorly defined, limiting the distinction between pathological and physiological activity. Here, we characterised interictal epileptic and non-epileptic events during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep across multiple thalamic nuclei and examined their associations to seizure outcomes. METHODS: We analysed NREM sleep SEEG recordings from 64 patients with drug-resistant focal epilepsy. Electrodes sampled four thalamic nuclei: centromedian (CM), pulvinar (Pu), ventral lateral (VL), and ventral posterolateral (VPL). Patients were classified into three outcome groups: favourable, unfavourable, and surgically non-remediable. Rates of thalamic spikes, high-frequency oscillations (HFOs), spike-fast activity, and sleep spindles were analysed and compared across nuclei and outcomes. FINDINGS: Recordings of the thalamus revealed both pathological and physiological interictal events. Interictal epileptic events were infrequent. Only ∼0.2% of seizure-onset zone spikes propagated to the thalamus. Thalamic spike-fast activity was indicative of unfavourable surgical outcomes (CM: p = 0.047, d = 0.46) or surgically non-remediable epilepsy (VL: p = 0.002, d = 0.84). In contrast, thalamic sleep spindles were ubiquitous but reduced in surgically non-remediable patients (CM: p = 0.031, d = -0.58; VL: p = 0.005, d = -0.79). Finally, unique thalamic SEEG patterns were identified, including spikes concomitant with spindles, isolated spikes, and physiological fast ripples. INTERPRETATION: This study provides a comprehensive characterisation of thalamic interictal events during NREM sleep, enriching our understanding of thalamic pathophysiology and highlighting the value of thalamic recordings in presurgical evaluation. FUNDING: Start-up funding of Duke University; National Natural Science Foundation of China (82471469, 82301636); Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation (LD24H090003); Canadian Institutes of Health Research funding (PJT-175056).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".