Sobczak-Edmans Monika, Lo Yu-Chun, Hsu Yung-Chin, Chen Yu-Jen, Kwok Fu Yu, Chuang Kai-Hsiang, Tseng Wen-Yih Isaac, Chen S H Annabel
Department of Psychology, De Montfort University, Leicester, United Kingdom.
Graduate Institute of Neural Regenerative Medicine, College of Medical Science and Technology, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2019 Jan 8;12:530. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2018.00530. eCollection 2018.
The current study examined the structural and functional connectivity of the cerebro-cerebellar network of verbal working memory as proposed by Chen and Desmond (2005a). Diffusion spectrum imaging was employed to establish structural connectivity between cerebro-cerebellar regions co-activated during a verbal working memory task. The inferior frontal gyrus, inferior parietal lobule, pons, thalamus, superior cerebellum and inferior cerebellum were used as regions of interest to reconstruct and segment the contralateral white matter cerebro-cerebellar circuitry. The segmented pathways were examined further to establish the relationship between structural and effective connectivity as well as the relationship between structural connectivity and verbal working memory performance. No direct relationship between structural and effective connectivity was found but the results demonstrated that structural connectivity is indirectly related to effective connectivity as DCM models that resembled more closely with underlying white matter pathways had a higher degree of model inference confidence. Additionally, it was demonstrated that the structural connectivity of the ponto-cerebellar tract was associated with individual differences in response time for verbal working memory. The findings of the study contribute to further our understanding of the relationship between structural and functional connectivity and the impact of variability in verbal working memory performance.
本研究考察了Chen和Desmond（2005a）提出的言语工作记忆的脑-小脑网络的结构和功能连接。采用扩散谱成像技术来建立在言语工作记忆任务中共同激活的脑-小脑区域之间的结构连接。额下回、顶下小叶、脑桥、丘脑、小脑上蚓部和小脑下蚓部被用作感兴趣区域，以重建和分割对侧白质脑-小脑回路。对分割后的通路进行进一步检查，以建立结构连接与有效连接之间的关系以及结构连接与言语工作记忆表现之间的关系。未发现结构连接与有效连接之间存在直接关系，但结果表明，结构连接与有效连接间接相关，因为与潜在白质通路更相似的动态因果模型具有更高的模型推断置信度。此外，研究表明脑桥-小脑束的结构连接与言语工作记忆反应时间的个体差异有关。该研究结果有助于进一步加深我们对结构连接与功能连接之间关系以及言语工作记忆表现变异性影响的理解。
