The association between lesion location and functional outcome after ischemic stroke

Abstract

Background: Infarct location has a critical effect on patient outcome after ischemic stroke, but the study of its role independent of overall lesion volume is challenging. We performed a retrospective, hypothesis-generating study of the effect of infarct location on three-month functional outcome in a pooled analysis of the EPITHET and DEFUSE studies.Methods: Posttreatment MRI diffusion lesions were manually segmented and transformed into standard-space. A novel composite brain atlas derived from three standard brain atlases and encompassing 132 cortical and sub-cortical structures was used to segment the transformed lesion into different brain regions, and calculate the percentage of each r..