Early thalamic line-length increase did not show a clear association with seizure duration in pediatric thalamic SEEG

A pre-registered analysis tested whether seizures with a larger early increase in ipsilateral thalamic line length (LL) lasted longer within the same patient. It used archived per-pair LL arrays and seizure event marks for 50 seizures from 17 patients in pediatric thalamic SEEG (OpenNeuro ds007445 v1.0.4). After centering within patients, the thalamic association was r = 0.26 (patient-bootstrap 95% CI -0.36 to 0.68; within-patient permutation p = 0.28). Thalamus minus white matter gave r = 0.12 (p = 0.56), and the seizure-onset-zone control gave r = 0.19 (p = 0.29); all Holm-adjusted p values were 0.84. A 0–20 s window, cortex, white matter, and per-patient and between-patient analyses also showed no clear effect. Cortex had the largest point estimate (r = 0.36, p = 0.062, uncorrected). These data do not show a thalamus-specific association between early LL increase and seizure duration. The small sample and wide confidence interval do not exclude a moderate effect. LL is a broad-band signal measure, clinical offset marks are uncertain, four seizures were shorter than the 10 s analysis window, and thalamic nuclei were pooled.

thalamus · seizure duration · line length · stereo-EEG · pediatric epilepsy · within-patient analysis