The Synchronicity Analysis Between The Spinal Cord Networks And The Human Brain Networks

It has been reported that spontaneous fluctuations of blood oxygen level dependent(BOLD) signals can be detected in the human spinal cord and constitute resting state networks as well as human brain. As we all know, the spinal cord is responsible for relaying motor signals from human brain to the body periphery, as well as the transmission of somatosensory information from the body periphery to the human brain, which suggest that functional connectivity may exist between the spinal cord and human brain. Here, we use independent component analysis(ICA) to demonstrate this question in healthy human volunteers.The research content of this article mainly divided into two parts: analysing the the correlation between the resting-state networks(RSNs) in human brain and the spinal cord,as well as the correlation between the tasking-state networks(TSNs) in human brain and the spinal cord which included the datas of stamulated the little finger of the right hand and the datas of stamulated the lip. From the Angle of anatomy, the structure of the spinal cord is in "H" shape, so for the spinal cord can be roughly divided into four parts " the left anterior horn, the right anterior horn, the left and right rear corner.” Otherwise, the left and the right anterior horn are responsible for relaying motor signals from human brain to the body periphery as well as the transmission of somatosensory information from the body periphery to the human brain. So we identified the somatomotor network in the human brain that were mirroring the functional neuroanatomy and likely reflecting sensory and motor processing with the spinal cord, moreover, we also identified the default network 、the attention networks and the visual network to be the control networks. Base on the previous research production, we selected the supramarginal gyrus(SMG) for the little finger simulation datas and the postcentral gyrus(GpoC) for the lip simulation datas. In addition, we calculate the resting state functional connectivity between these RSNs chose from human brain and the spinal cord respectively with corresponding time series.We found that all of the networks in spinal cord are mostly focusing on a certain segment rather than distributing all segments on the spinal cord, which accorded with the anatomic features of the spinal cord. Otherwise, the analysis result shows that there has a stronger and more stable correlation between the somatomotor network of human brain and the RSNs of the spinal cord than other control resting-state networks of human brain. Together, Once again, our data demonstrate that intrinsically highly organized resting-state fluctuations exist in the human spinal cord. Together, for the interesting tasking-state network,we found there also existed a stable correlation between the intersting networks of human brain and the RSNs of the spinal cord. Compared to the correlation between the resting-state networks and the spinal cord segment networks, there has been a stronger correlation between the tasking-state networks and the spinal cord segment networks. So, our finding suggests that there is a synchronicity between the RSNs of spinal cord and the RSNs of the brain and are thus a hallmark of the entire central nervous system.