Key Laboratory for NeuroInformation of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610054, China.
Schizophr Res. 2012 Nov;141(2-3):109-18. doi: 10.1016/j.schres.2012.08.021. Epub 2012 Sep 13.
Schizophrenia is a debilitating mental disorder characterized by disturbances of thought and emotion as well as neurocognitive deficits. It is hypothesized that the core symptoms of schizophrenia arise from the inability to integrate neural processes segregated across distributed brain regions. Graph theory allows us to verify this hypothesis at large-scale structural network level. In this study, a sample of 101 schizophrenic patients and 101 healthy controls was included. We sought to investigate the abnormality of network topological organization in patients with schizophrenia by using the cortical thickness measurement from magnetic resonance imaging. Brain networks were constructed by thresholding cortical thickness correlation matrices of 78 regions and analyzed using graph theoretical approaches. Compared to healthy controls, patients showed increased characteristic path length and clustering coefficient in the structural cortical networks. Moreover, schizophrenia patients were associated with reduced nodal centrality in several regions of the default network and increased nodal centrality mainly in primary cortex and paralimbic cortex regions. These findings suggest that the structural networks of schizophrenic patients have a less optimal topological organization, resulting in reduced capacity to integrate information across brain regions.
精神分裂症是一种使人衰弱的精神障碍，其特征是思维和情绪紊乱以及神经认知缺陷。有人假设，精神分裂症的核心症状源于无法整合分布在大脑不同区域的神经过程。图论允许我们在大规模结构网络层面上验证这一假设。在这项研究中，纳入了 101 名精神分裂症患者和 101 名健康对照者的样本。我们试图通过使用磁共振成像的皮质厚度测量来研究精神分裂症患者网络拓扑组织的异常。通过对 78 个区域的皮质厚度相关矩阵进行阈值处理来构建脑网络，并使用图论方法进行分析。与健康对照组相比，精神分裂症患者在结构皮质网络中表现出特征路径长度和聚类系数增加。此外，精神分裂症患者与默认网络中几个区域的节点中心性降低有关，而主要在初级皮质和边缘皮质区域的节点中心性增加。这些发现表明，精神分裂症患者的结构网络具有较差的拓扑组织，导致跨脑区整合信息的能力降低。
