The Clinical Hospital of Chengdu Brain Science Institute, MOE Key Laboratory for Neuroinformation, Center for Information in Medicine, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China.
The Clinical Hospital of Chengdu Brain Science Institute, MOE Key Laboratory for Neuroinformation, Center for Information in Medicine, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China; Department of Biomedical Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA.
Schizophr Res. 2024 Feb;264:336-344. doi: 10.1016/j.schres.2023.12.033. Epub 2024 Jan 12.
Schizophrenia is a serious mental disorder whose etiology remains unclear. Although numerous studies have analyzed the abnormal gray matter functional activity and whole-brain anatomical changes in schizophrenia, fMRI signal fluctuations from white matter have usually been ignored and rarely reported in the literature.
We employed 45 schizophrenia subjects and 75 healthy controls (HCs) from a publicly available fMRI dataset. By combining the voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity (VMHC) measure and fiber tracking method, we investigated the interhemispheric functional and structural connectivity within whole brain in schizophrenia.
Compared to HCs, patients with schizophrenia exhibited significantly reduced VMHC in the bilateral middle occipital gyrus, precentral gyrus, postcentral gyrus and corpus callosum. Fiber tracking results showed the changes in structural connectivity for the bilateral precentral gyrus, and the bilateral corpus callosum, and the fiber bundles connecting bilateral precentral gyrus and connecting the bilateral corpus callosum passed through the posterior midbody, isthmus and splenium of mid-sagittal corpus callosum, which closely related to the interhemispheric integration of visual and auditory information. More importantly, we observed a negative correlation between averaged VMHC values in the postcentral gyrus and SAPS scores, and a positive correlation between the fractional anisotropy of fiber bundle connecting the bilateral precentral gyrus and Matrix Reasoning scores in schizophrenia.
Our findings provide a novel perspective of white matter functional images on understanding abnormal interhemispheric visual and auditory information transfer in schizophrenia.
精神分裂症是一种严重的精神障碍，其病因仍不清楚。尽管许多研究分析了精神分裂症患者的异常灰质功能活动和全脑解剖结构变化，但功能磁共振成像（fMRI）信号的白质波动通常被忽略，在文献中很少报道。
我们结合体素镜像同伦相关（VMHC）测量和纤维追踪方法，对来自公开的 fMRI 数据集的 45 名精神分裂症患者和 75 名健康对照者（HCs）进行了研究，调查了精神分裂症患者全脑的半球间功能和结构连通性。
与 HCs 相比，精神分裂症患者双侧中枕叶、中央前回、中央后回和胼胝体的 VMHC 显著降低。纤维追踪结果显示双侧中央前回、双侧胼胝体的结构连接发生了变化，连接双侧中央前回和连接双侧胼胝体的纤维束通过胼胝体后体、峡部和中间矢状位胼胝体的压部，这与视觉和听觉信息的半球间整合密切相关。更重要的是，我们观察到中央后回的平均 VMHC 值与阳性和阴性症状量表（SAPS）评分呈负相关，双侧中央前回纤维束的各向异性分数与矩阵推理评分呈正相关。
我们的研究结果为理解精神分裂症患者半球间异常视觉和听觉信息传递提供了一个新的视角。
