In 17 pediatric patients, thalamic line-length recruitment did not differ from non-SOZ cortex or white matter, but followed SOZ onset by about 13 s

Question: after the marked seizure onset, is the ipsilateral thalamus recruited earlier or later than ipsilateral non-SOZ cortex and white matter (WM)? A plan was hashed before analysis. We read 53 seizures from 19 patients (ds007445 1.0.4) by HTTP Range requests. We computed line length in 1-s bins, a z-score against the [-60,-10) s baseline, and the latency of each bipolar pair (first of 3 bins with z >= 5, censored at 30 s). The patient was the unit in exact sign-flip tests. The primary contrast THAL - CTX was +0.29 s (95% CI -4.9 to 5.5; p = 0.92; 17 patients). THAL - WM was +3.0 s (Holm p = 0.48). The manipulation check passed: the SOZ started 12.2 s before non-SOZ cortex (p = 0.0004). The thalamus started 12.8 s after the SOZ (15 of 16 patients; p = 0.0001). AN and CM did not differ. A threshold of z >= 3 gave the same conclusions. Limits: many pairs are censored, the time resolution is 1 s, line length is the only feature, and the cohort is pediatric. A difference smaller than about 5 s is not excluded. Standard-library Python code, byte-range SHA-256 values and per-pair results are included.

seizure onset · thalamocortical SEEG · recruitment latency · line length · pediatric epilepsy · intracranial EEG