Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA.
School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA.
Sci Rep. 2020 Dec 9;10(1):21589. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-78394-z.
Despite the relative successes in the surgical treatment of pharmacoresistant epilepsy, there is rather little research on the neural (re)organization that potentially subserves behavioral compensation. Here, we examined the post-surgical functional connectivity (FC) in children and adolescents who have undergone unilateral cortical resection and, yet, display remarkably normal behavior. Conventionally, FC has been investigated in terms of the mean correlation of the BOLD time courses extracted from different brain regions. Here, we demonstrated the value of segregating the voxel-wise relationships into mutually exclusive populations that were either positively or negatively correlated. While, relative to controls, the positive correlations were largely normal, negative correlations among networks were increased. Together, our results point to reorganization in the contralesional hemisphere, possibly suggesting competition for cortical territory due to the demand for representation of function. Conceivably, the ubiquitous negative correlations enable the differentiation of function in the reduced cortical volume following a unilateral resection.
尽管在耐药性癫痫的手术治疗方面取得了相对的成功，但对于潜在的行为补偿所涉及的神经（再）组织，研究相对较少。在这里，我们研究了那些已经接受单侧皮质切除但表现出显著正常行为的儿童和青少年的术后功能连接（FC）。传统上，FC 是根据从不同脑区提取的 BOLD 时程的平均相关性来研究的。在这里，我们证明了将体素间的关系分离成相互排斥的群体的价值，这些群体要么是正相关的，要么是负相关的。虽然与对照组相比，正相关基本正常，但网络之间的负相关增加了。总之，我们的结果指向对侧半球的重组，可能由于对功能的代表的需求而导致对皮质区域的竞争。可以想象，在单侧切除后，由于皮质体积减少，普遍存在的负相关可以使功能分化。
