Attention over vulnerable brain regions associating cerebral palsy disorder and biological markers.

Introduction: Cerebral palsy (CP) is a neurological disorder caused by cerebral ischemia and hypoxia during fetal brain development.Early intervention in CP favors medications and therapies; however, monitoring early brain development in children with CP is critical. It is essential to thoroughly examine brain-vulnerable regions associated with biological traits (BTs).Variations in BTs were evident in children with CP; however, it is critical to explore the BTs' impact on the brains of healthy controls (HC) and CP-disordered children.

Objective: This study associates BTs with HC and CP children.This study investigates the neurodevelopment of HC and CP underlying BTs. This study establishes a benchmark for the association of BT with HC and CP children.

Method: The proposed AWG-Net is composed of customized spatial-channel (CSC) and multi-head self (MHA) attentions, where CSC blocks are incorporated at the first few stages, MHA at later stages, and cumulative-dense structures to propagate susceptible regions to deeper layers. The training samples include T1-w, T2-w, Flair, and Sag, annotated with age, gender, and weight.

Results: The significant results for HC and CP are age (HC: MAE = 1.05, MCS=85.63, R=0.844; CP: MAE = 1.16, MCS=84.79, R=0.717), gender (HC: Acc = 82.98%, CP: Acc = 82.00%), and weight (HC: MAE = 4.65, MCS=56.30, R=0.78; CP: MAE = 2.85, MCS=70.24, R=0.82). Vulnerable regions for age are the cerebellar hemisphere, frontal, occipital, and parietal bones in HC and inconsistent in CP. HC and CP commonalities are in the frontal bone and cerebellar hemisphere with HC and discrepant in the occipital and temporal bones for CP. Similarly, gender differences are found for HC and CP.

Conclusion: Age and gender are marginally less affected by the brain regions vulnerable to CP than weight estimation. T1-w is appropriate for age, weight, and gender. The learned trends are different for HC and CP in brain development and gender while slightly different in the case of weight.