Department of MRI, Key Laboratory for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Molecular Imaging of Henan Province, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, No.1 Jianshe Dong Road, Erqi District, Zhengzhou, 450052, Henan, China.
Department of Radiology, Tianjin Key Laboratory of Functional Imaging, Tianjin Medical University General Hospital, Tianjin, China.
Brain Imaging Behav. 2024 Oct;18(5):1323-1332. doi: 10.1007/s11682-024-00908-4. Epub 2024 Aug 24.
Potential changes in patterns of dynamic functional network connections at the cerebellar-cerebral level in pontine infarction (PI) patients remain unclear. The study aimed to investigate the abnormal patterns of dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) between the cerebellar subregions within networks and regions of the cerebral cortex in patients with PI. Forty-six chronic left pontine infarction (LPI), 32 chronic right pontine infarction (RPI), and 50 healthy controls (HCs) were recruited to undergo resting-state fMRI scans. Cerebellar-cerebral dFC was characterized using the sliding window method and seed-based connectivity analyses. Correlations between altered dFC values and clinical variables (The Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test and Flanker task) in PI patients and healthy controls were investigated. Compared with HCs, the PI groups showed significantly aberrant cerebellar-cerebral dFC between cerebellar subregions within networks and supratentorial cerebral cortex, including executive, default-mode, and motor networks. Furthermore, Correlation analysis showed a decoupling between abnormal dFC and cognitive functions in PI patients. These findings indicate that PI patients are accompanied by damage to cerebellar subregions within networks and cerebellar-cerebral pathways, which may provide a potential target for treatment or an indication of therapeutic efficacy.
潜在的脑桥梗死（PI）患者小脑-大脑水平的动态功能网络连接模式的变化尚不清楚。本研究旨在探讨 PI 患者小脑网络内各亚区与大脑皮质区之间动态功能连接（dFC）的异常模式。招募了 46 例慢性左侧脑桥梗死（LPI）、32 例慢性右侧脑桥梗死（RPI）和 50 例健康对照者（HCs）进行静息态 fMRI 扫描。采用滑动窗口法和种子点连接分析来描述小脑-大脑 dFC。研究了 PI 患者和健康对照者改变的 dFC 值与临床变量（ Rey 听觉言语学习测试和 Flanker 任务）之间的相关性。与 HCs 相比，PI 组在网络内小脑亚区与大脑皮质之间的小脑-大脑 dFC 表现出明显的异常，包括执行、默认模式和运动网络。此外，相关性分析显示 PI 患者异常 dFC 与认知功能之间存在脱耦。这些发现表明 PI 患者伴有网络内小脑亚区和小脑-大脑通路的损伤，这可能为治疗提供潜在的靶点或治疗效果的指标。
