The Mind Research Network, Albuquerque, NM, USA; School of Biomedical Engineering, Health Science Center, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China.
Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; School of Biomedical Engineering, Health Science Center, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China.
Neuroimage. 2018 Oct 15;180(Pt B):619-631. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.09.035. Epub 2017 Sep 20.
The human brain is a highly dynamic system with non-stationary neural activity and rapidly-changing neural interaction. Resting-state dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) has been widely studied during recent years, and the emerging aberrant dFC patterns have been identified as important features of many mental disorders such as schizophrenia (SZ). However, only focusing on the time-varying patterns in FC is not enough, since the local neural activity itself (in contrast to the inter-connectivity) is also found to be highly fluctuating from research using high-temporal-resolution imaging techniques. Exploring the time-varying patterns in brain activity and their relationships with time-varying brain connectivity is important for advancing our understanding of the co-evolutionary property of brain network and the underlying mechanism of brain dynamics. In this study, we introduced a framework for characterizing time-varying brain activity and exploring its associations with time-varying brain connectivity, and applied this framework to a resting-state fMRI dataset including 151 SZ patients and 163 age- and gender matched healthy controls (HCs). In this framework, 48 brain regions were first identified as intrinsic connectivity networks (ICNs) using group independent component analysis (GICA). A sliding window approach was then adopted for the estimation of dynamic amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (dALFF) and dFC, which were used to measure time-varying brain activity and time-varying brain connectivity respectively. The dALFF was further clustered into six reoccurring states by the k-means clustering method and the group difference in occurrences of dALFF states was explored. Lastly, correlation coefficients between dALFF and dFC were calculated and the group difference in these dALFF-dFC correlations was explored. Our results suggested that 1) ALFF of brain regions was highly fluctuating during the resting-state and such dynamic patterns are altered in SZ, 2) dALFF and dFC were correlated in time and their correlations are altered in SZ. The overall results support and expand prior work on abnormalities of brain activity, static FC (sFC) and dFC in SZ, and provide new evidence on aberrant time-varying brain activity and its associations with brain connectivity in SZ, which might underscore the disrupted brain cognitive functions in this mental disorder.
人脑是一个具有非平稳神经活动和快速变化的神经相互作用的高度动态系统。近年来,静息态动态功能连接(dFC)已被广泛研究,新兴的异常 dFC 模式已被确定为许多精神障碍(如精神分裂症(SZ))的重要特征。然而,仅关注 FC 中的时变模式是不够的,因为使用高时间分辨率成像技术的研究发现,局部神经活动本身(与相互连接相反)也高度波动。探索大脑活动的时变模式及其与时变脑连接的关系,对于深入了解脑网络的协同进化特性和脑动力学的潜在机制至关重要。在这项研究中,我们引入了一个用于描述时变脑活动并探索其与时变脑连接关系的框架,并将该框架应用于包括 151 名 SZ 患者和 163 名年龄和性别匹配的健康对照(HCs)的静息态 fMRI 数据集。在该框架中,首先使用组独立成分分析(GICA)将 48 个脑区识别为内在连接网络(ICNs)。然后采用滑动窗口方法估计低频波动(dALFF)和 dFC 的动态幅度,分别用于测量时变脑活动和时变脑连接。然后通过 k-均值聚类方法将 dALFF 进一步聚类为六个重复状态,并探讨了 dALFF 状态发生的组间差异。最后,计算了 dALFF 和 dFC 之间的相关系数,并探讨了这些 dALFF-dFC 相关性的组间差异。我们的结果表明:1)在静息状态下,大脑区域的 ALFF 波动很大,而这种动态模式在 SZ 中发生了改变;2)dALFF 和 dFC 在时间上是相关的,它们的相关性在 SZ 中发生了改变。总的来说,这些结果支持并扩展了之前关于 SZ 中脑活动、静态 FC(sFC)和 dFC 异常的工作,并提供了 SZ 中异常时变脑活动及其与脑连接关系的新证据,这可能突显了这种精神障碍中大脑认知功能的紊乱。