Key laboratory for NeuroInformation of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology and Center for Information in BioMedicine, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 610054, People's Republic of China.
Department of Psychology, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida.
Hum Brain Mapp. 2017 Nov;38(11):5740-5755. doi: 10.1002/hbm.23764. Epub 2017 Aug 9.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition associated with altered brain connectivity. Previous neuroimaging research demonstrates inconsistent results, particularly in studies of functional connectivity in ASD. Typically, these inconsistent findings are results of studies using static measures of resting-state functional connectivity. Recent work has demonstrated that functional brain connections are dynamic, suggesting that static connectivity metrics fail to capture nuanced time-varying properties of functional connections in the brain. Here we used a dynamic functional connectivity approach to examine the differences in the strength and variance of dynamic functional connections between individuals with ASD and healthy controls (HCs). The variance of dynamic functional connections was defined as the respective standard deviations of the dynamic functional connectivity strength across time. We utilized a large multicenter dataset of 507 male subjects (209 with ASD and 298 HC, from 6 to 36 years old) from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) to identify six distinct whole-brain dynamic functional connectivity states. Analyses demonstrated greater variance of widespread long-range dynamic functional connections in ASD (P < 0.05, NBS method) and weaker dynamic functional connections in ASD (P < 0.05, NBS method) within specific whole-brain connectivity states. Hypervariant dynamic connections were also characterized by weaker connectivity strength in ASD compared with HC. Increased variance of dynamic functional connections was also related to ASD symptom severity (ADOS total score) (P < 0.05), and was most prominent in connections related to the medial superior frontal gyrus and temporal pole. These results demonstrate that greater intraindividual dynamic variance is a potential biomarker of ASD. Hum Brain Mapp 38:5740-5755, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
自闭症谱系障碍(ASD)是一种与大脑连接改变有关的神经发育疾病。先前的神经影像学研究表明结果不一致,尤其是在 ASD 的功能连接研究中。通常,这些不一致的发现是使用静息态功能连接的静态测量的研究结果。最近的研究表明,大脑功能连接是动态的,这表明静态连接指标未能捕捉大脑功能连接随时间变化的细微特征。在这里,我们使用动态功能连接方法来研究 ASD 患者和健康对照(HC)之间功能连接强度和变异性的差异。动态功能连接的变异性被定义为动态功能连接强度随时间变化的相应标准差。我们利用来自自闭症脑成像数据交换(ABIDE)的 507 名男性受试者(209 名 ASD 和 298 名 HC,年龄 6 至 36 岁)的大型多中心数据集,识别出六个不同的全脑动态功能连接状态。分析表明,ASD 中广泛的长程动态功能连接的变异性更大(P < 0.05,NBS 方法),并且特定全脑连接状态中的 ASD 动态功能连接较弱(P < 0.05,NBS 方法)。在 ASD 中,超变异动态连接的特征还表现为与 HC 相比,连接强度较弱。动态功能连接的变异性增加也与 ASD 症状严重程度(ADOS 总分)相关(P < 0.05),在与内侧额上回和颞极相关的连接中最为明显。这些结果表明,更大的个体内动态变异性是 ASD 的一个潜在生物标志物。人类大脑映射 38:5740-5755,2017。©2017 威利期刊公司