Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA.
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA.
Schizophr Res. 2020 Jun;220:201-209. doi: 10.1016/j.schres.2020.03.020. Epub 2020 Mar 20.
Schizophrenia has long been associated with dysfunction in visual perception. One important region underlying this is lateral occipital cortex (LOC), a mid-level visual region critical for object recognition. Although LOC of patients has exhibited structural and functional abnormalities in MR brain imaging studies, how it interacts with other networks over time under rest and with task demands remains to be clarified. The present study investigated the spatial-temporal interaction of LOC with other brain networks by examining functional connectivity communities of the brain over time. We found increased temporal instability of LOC connectivity over time under both resting and task-switching conditions in patients. In the resting state, LOC of patients had increased interaction with the frontoparietal task-control network (FPTC) and thalamus compared with controls, while during task switching, LOC showed increased interaction with the default mode network (DMN). Temporal instability of LOC connectivity was positively correlated with patients' switching cost during task performance and with hallucination severity. These results indicate that reduced stability of LOC connectivity may be an important factor underlying neurocognitive dysfunctions and symptom severity in schizophrenia.
精神分裂症长期以来与视觉感知功能障碍有关。一个重要的相关区域是外侧枕叶皮层（LOC），这是一个对物体识别至关重要的中级视觉区域。尽管磁共振脑成像研究已经表明患者的 LOC 存在结构和功能异常，但它在休息和任务需求下如何随时间与其他网络相互作用仍有待阐明。本研究通过检查大脑随时间的功能连接社区，研究了 LOC 与其他大脑网络的时空相互作用。我们发现，在休息和任务转换条件下，患者的 LOC 连接随时间的推移呈现出更高的时间不稳定性。在静息状态下，与对照组相比，患者的 LOC 与额顶叶任务控制网络（FPTC）和丘脑的相互作用增加，而在任务转换期间，LOC 与默认模式网络（DMN）的相互作用增加。LOC 连接的时间不稳定性与患者在任务执行过程中的转换成本以及幻觉严重程度呈正相关。这些结果表明，LOC 连接稳定性的降低可能是精神分裂症神经认知功能障碍和症状严重程度的一个重要因素。
