Alterations Of Brain Network Efficiency In Patients With Refractory Epilepsy

Objective To discuss the alterations of brain network efficiency in patients with refractory epilepsy.Methods Twenty-six patients with refractory epilepsy and 26 healthy controls with age,sex and education level matched in the Affiliated Anhui Provincial Hospital,Anhui Medical University,were recruited from October 2015 to June 2016,the data of resting-state f MRI in both groups were collected and the data were preprocessed with Network Construction which is a part of GRETNA to obtain the Matrix of brain network.Network Analysis was used to obtain Global and Local efficiency,regarding the sparsity of the connected matrix as the threshold,in the range of 0.05 to 0.40,the brain network efficiency between the two groups were compared.Results Epilepsy group and healthy control group had no statistical significance in the difference of age,gender and level of education(P > 0.05),and the group of patients with epilepsy in Montreal cognitive assessment(Mo CA)scale score was significantly lower than the healthy control group [(19.6-2.7),respectively(26.8-3.6),P = 0.026].The global network efficiency of the refractory epilepsy group was significantly lower than that of the healthy control group in the range of 0.11 to 0.18(P<0.05),the average Local network efficiency were compared between the two groups in the range of 0.05 to 0.40,it was found that besides the local efficiency of the refractory epilepsy group in the hippocampus was lower than that of the healthy control group,the local efficiency of the refractory epilepsy group in the right insula,the left opercular inferior frontal gyrus,the left inferior temporal gyrus,the left superior occipital gyrus and the right globus pallidus was higher than than of the healthy control group.Conclusions The global network efficiency of the refractory epilepsy group was significantly lower than the healthy control group within a certain range of threshold,and the local efficiency of local brain area shows abnormal,the aberrant network efficiency may be the neural network basis of clinical symptoms in patients with intractable epilepsy.