A Research Of Morphological Brain Network In Young Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism spectrum disorder(ASD)is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by different levels of social communication barriers and repetitive and stereotypic behavior.Evidence from brain connectivity suggests that behavior affected by ASD are caused by deficits in distributed brain networks rather than single regions of the brain,some studies have found that global or local brain connections in ASD are functionally and structurally alerted.However,the abnormalities of brain morphological network in ASD is still unclear.The current article explores two different morphological network of children with ASD based on high-resolution structural magnetic resonance imaging(sMRI).The first study in this article selects fourteen subcortical brain regions as the entry point.By using volumetric-based methodology and structural covariance approach,we mapped the structural covariance network of subcortical regions in groups of young children with ASD and typically developing.The results demonstrated decreased interhemispheric structural covariation and enhanced intra-hemispheric structural covariation,and abnormal subcortical structural covariance can predict social communication and repetitive and stereotypic behavior in ASD.Overall,the study revealed that an early developmental result that prevents coordinated brain maturation of subcortical regions related to social cognition and repetitive and stereotypic behavior in ASD.In order to overcome the limitations of the structural covariance network,that is,one network can only be constructed based on a group of participants.The second study in this article construct individual-level,KLS-based,whole-brain morphological brain networks and further characterized their topological organizations at both global and nodal levels.The results show that there is an abnormal sub-network in the morphological brain network of ASD and the connections in this network are decreased.Further morphological brain networks of the two groups of children have small-world characteristics,and children with ASD exhibited significantly decreased global topological properties(such as shortest path and local efficiency),while local topological properties(node efficiency,node clustering coefficient and the centrality of the node number)also showed significantly abnormal.The study is an extension of previous studies on functional and structural brain network abnormalities in ASD.The abnormalities of morphological brain network structure and global / local topological properties can be used as biological markers for early developmental disorders in ASD.In summary,this paper probed the abnormal trajectory of morphological brain network in young children with ASD.First,the structural covariance network was constructed by using fourteen subcortical brain regions,and then the individual-level morphological brain network was characterized at the whole brain level.The two studies jointly revealed an abnormal pattern of morphological brain network in young children with ASD.The abnormal pattern helps to understand the etiology and neuropathological mechanism of ASD,and provides a basis for clinical diagnosis and treatment.