Functional Parcellation And Connectivity Analysis Of The Human's Hippocampus

Research and exploration on the structure and function of the human's brain has been always one of the most challenging topic in frontier science.In order to reveal the cognitive mechanism,we need to have a clear understanding about the functional areas in brain.As a non-invasive vivo imaging technique,functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI)has been widely used in research.For human,the hippocampus plays an important role in learning,memory and cognitive.Studies in humans and animals show that the hippocampus is structurally and functionally heterogeneous and can be segmented into distinct subregions.Besides,it is reported that hippocampus has been involved in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia.Based on fMRI data,this paper investigated the functional subregions based on its functional connectivity patterns,and then examined the possible changes of hippocampal connectivity in schizophrenia.In this study,there are several parts as following.Investigating the functional parcellation of the hippocampus based on DEC.In this study,we used Discriminative Embedded Clustering(DEC)to segment the bilateral hippocampus separately into three subregions.At the same time,we obtained functional connectivity patterns of each subregion.Consistent with previous research,we found that the hippocampus can be segmented into three subregions along the anterior-posterior axis in human.Examined the possible changes of hippocampal functional connectivity in schizophrenia.In this study,we investigated hippocampal functional connectivity differences between patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls.Seed-based correlation analysis was performed by using seeds from previous hippocampal parcellation.We found that the anterior part of the hippocampus showed abnormal functional connectivity with occipital lobe,cingulate cortex,subcortex and cerebellum in schizophrenia,which may be related to some symptoms in schizophrenia.