School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece.
Hellenic Military Academy, Vari, Athens, Greece.
Brain Topogr. 2022 May;35(3):352-362. doi: 10.1007/s10548-022-00892-2. Epub 2022 Feb 25.
Previous sMRI, DTI and rs-fMRI studies in small cell lung cancer (SCLC) patients have reported that patients after chemotherapy had gray and white matter structural alterations along with functional deficits. Nonetheless, few are known regarding the potential alterations in the topological organization of the WM structural network in SCLC patients after chemotherapy. In this context, the scope of the present study is to evaluate the WM structural network of 20 SCLC patients after chemotherapy and to 14 healthy controls, by applying a combination of DTI with graph theory. The results revealed that both SCLC and healthy controls groups demonstrated small world properties. The SCLC patients had decreased values in the clustering coefficient, local efficiency and degree metrics as well as increased shortest path length when compared to the healthy controls. Moreover, the two groups reported different topological reorganization of hub distribution. Lastly, the SCLC patients exhibited significantly decreased structural connectivity in comparison to the healthy group. These results underline that the topological organization of the WM structural network in SCLC patients was disrupted and hence constitute new vital information regarding the effects that chemotherapy and cancer may have in the patients' brain at network level.
先前针对小细胞肺癌（SCLC）患者的 sMRI、DTI 和 rs-fMRI 研究报告称，化疗后的患者存在灰质和白质结构改变以及功能缺陷。然而，目前对于化疗后 SCLC 患者的 WM 结构网络的拓扑组织的潜在改变知之甚少。在这种情况下，本研究旨在通过 DTI 与图论相结合，评估 20 名化疗后的 SCLC 患者和 14 名健康对照者的 WM 结构网络。结果表明，SCLC 组和健康对照组均表现出小世界特性。与健康对照组相比，SCLC 患者的聚类系数、局部效率和度度量值降低，最短路径长度增加。此外，两组的枢纽分布拓扑重排不同。最后，与健康组相比，SCLC 患者的结构连接性显著降低。这些结果表明，SCLC 患者的 WM 结构网络的拓扑组织被打乱，因此在网络层面上构成了有关化疗和癌症可能对患者大脑产生影响的新的重要信息。
