Department of Emergency Medicine, Hanyang Hospital Affiliated to Wuhan University of Science, Wuhan, Hubei 430051, China.
Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei 430051, China.
Contrast Media Mol Imaging. 2022 Jul 4;2022:8493729. doi: 10.1155/2022/8493729. eCollection 2022.
Parkinson's disease (PD) is manifest clinically by an asymmetrical presentation of motor dysfunction. A large number of previous neuroimaging research studies have stated the alteration in the hemispheric asymmetry of morphological features in PD disease. Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which is noninvasive, has been widely used to quantify the white matter network in the human brain of both healthy subjects and patients. Besides, graph theory analysis is widely used to quantify the topological architecture of the human brain network. Lately, researchers have discovered that the topological architecture of the white matter network significantly differs in PD compared with healthy controls (HC). Nevertheless, the asymmetry of the topological architecture of the white matter network for PD patients remains unclear. To clarify this, the diffusion-weighted images and tractography technique were used to reconstruct the hemispherical white matter networks for 22 bilateral PD patients and 18 HC subjects. Network-based statistical analysis and graph theory analysis approaches were employed to estimate the asymmetry at both the connectivity level and the hemispheric topological level for PD patients. We found that the PD group showed atypically right-higher-than-left asymmetry in hemispheric brain global and local efficiencies. The detected right-higher-than-left asymmetry was driven by the atypically topological changes in the left hemispheric brain in the PD group. Findings from these studies might provide new insights into the asymmetric features of hemispheric disconnectivity and emphasize that the topological asymmetry of the hemispheric brain could be used as a biomarker to identify PD individuals.
帕金森病（PD）在临床上表现为运动功能障碍的非对称表现。大量先前的神经影像学研究表明，PD 患者大脑半球形态特征的半球不对称性发生了改变。弥散磁共振成像（MRI）是非侵入性的，已广泛用于量化健康受试者和患者大脑的白质网络。此外，图论分析广泛用于量化人脑网络的拓扑结构。最近，研究人员发现 PD 患者的白质网络拓扑结构与健康对照组（HC）存在显著差异。然而，PD 患者白质网络拓扑结构的不对称性仍不清楚。为了阐明这一点，使用弥散加权图像和轨迹技术重建了 22 名双侧 PD 患者和 18 名 HC 受试者的半球白质网络。采用基于网络的统计分析和图论分析方法，分别对 PD 患者的连接水平和半球拓扑水平的不对称性进行了估计。我们发现，PD 组在半球脑全局和局部效率方面表现出异常的右侧高于左侧的不对称性。PD 组左半球大脑的异常拓扑变化导致了这种右侧高于左侧的不对称性。这些研究结果可能为半球去连接的不对称特征提供新的见解，并强调半球大脑的拓扑不对称性可作为识别 PD 个体的生物标志物。
