Studies Of The Structural And Functional Connectivity Coupling In Schizophrenia With Multi-modal Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder with unknown cause and neuropathology,characterized by clinical symptoms of hallucination,delusions,linguistic dysfunction,and cognition impairments,et al.The structured-interview-based diagnosis of schizophrenia increases the risks of misdiagnosis and missed diagnosis due to the lack of objectivity.The brain complex networks constructed from magnetic resonance imaging(MRI)can be used to analyze the structural and functional brain alterations of schizophrenia patients.However,single-modal MRI cannot reveal the relationship between the structural and functional brain networks.The structural and functional connectivity couplings incorporate the information of the structural and functional brain networks,which aids the study of objective biomarkers of mental disorders.In this study,the structural and functional brain networks were constructed separately from multi-modal MRI data of the first episode schizophrenia(Fe SZ)and chronic schizophrenia(CSZ)patients.The global and nodal attributes of the networks were calculated using the analysis of human connectome.The structural and functional connectivity couplings were calculated at different levels.The between-groups differences and their correlations with the scores of scales were calculated using statistical analyses.The experimental contents and analysis results were as follow:1.A total of 212 subjects were recruited in this study,including 73 normal controls(NC),61 Fe SZ patients and 78 CSZ patients.The structural MRI(s MRI),diffusion tensor imaging(DTI),resting-state functional MRI(rs-f MRI),demographic data,and Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale(PANSS)scores were collected for each subject.2.Based on the Automated Anatomical Labeling(AAL)atlas,s MRI structural networks and f MRI networks were constructed from s MRI and rs-f MRI data for each subject.The couplings between structural and functional connectivity were calculated.The results were as follows: 1)the structural and functional connectivity couplings showed divergent alterations in Fe SZ and CSZ patients at different levels;2)in the patient group,the structural and functional connectivity couplings were positively correlated with the PANSS negative scores.3.Based on the functional brain atlas by Shen,DTI structural networks and f MRI functional networks were constructed from the DTI and rs-f MRI data for each subject.The structural and functional connectivity couplings were calculated.The results were as follows:1)the structural and functional connectivity couplings of the CSZ group altered,compared with the Fe SZ and NC groups;2)in the patient group,the structural and functional connectivity couplings were negatively correlated with both the positive and negative scores of PANSS.The findings of this study extended the structural and functional brain connectivity study of schizophrenia and also provided further reference for the study of objective biomarkers.The structural and functional connectivity couplings' relationships with the illness duration and cognitive scale scores could be further analyzed in order to explore how schizophrenia affects the alteration of structural and functional connectivity couplings.