Multi-scale Brain Resting Network Modeling And Brain Function Specificity In Patients With Neck Pain

The brain is an essential component of the human nervous system,responsible for almost all higher cognitive functions.With the continuous development of brain science,numerous scholars have explored the changes in patients’ brain functions in various diseases to obtain their underlying neural mechanism and provide a theoretical basis for clinical treatment.Chronic neck pain,as the fourth most disabling factor in the world,has been widely concerned.It is currently believed that chronic neck pain causes abnormal brain function,but its underlying neurological mechanisms are still unclear.Based on the fact that functional magnetic resonance imaging can accurately portray brain function by measuring the time-series signals generated by brain activity,this paper uses dynamic analysis and gradient analysis,extending from local to global,to model resting-state brain networks from multiple perspectives,and to explore abnormal brain function in patients with neck pain and further discuss the neural mechanisms of chronic neck pain.The main points are as follows:1.Using a dynamic low-frequency oscillation amplitude model based on Fourier transform,this thesis performed time-to-frequency conversion of functional magnetic resonance imaging data,combined with the sliding window method to measure the temporal variability of brain activity signals in the frequency domain,to portray the intensity of local neuronal spontaneous activity in the brain,and then explored the pathogenesis of neck pain by locating the differential brain regions between neck pain patients and healthy controls through statistical tests and correlation analysis.The results revealed reduced activity intensity in the brain areas related to sensory motor,emotional feedback and cognitive function in patients with neck pain,and found a correlation between neck pain and length of ambulatory work.This thesis confirms the effect of neck pain on the time-varying nature of brain signals in the low-frequency frequency domain,that is,the specificity of brain dynamics fluctuations induced by neck pain in local brain regions.2.According to the brain resting-state functional network model,the dynamic functional connectivity density metric was extracted,which can portray the connectivity strength of brain network nodes and reflect the synergistic relationship between brain regions.Statistical tests and other methods were then used to compare patients and controls to measure the specific brain function of patients with neck pain.The results showed that chronic neck pain could lead to abnormal activation of pain related brain regions,and these abnormalities correlated with clinical scale scores.This further suggests that chronic neck pain may cause alteration in the strength of connections between brain regions,that is,alteration in synergistic relationships,thus highlighting the link between the dynamic functioning of brain networks and the extent of the disease.3.The functional gradient model of thalamus and whole brain based on diffusion embedding was developed,in the case of spatial information as much as possible reserves,using nonlinear dimension reduction in brain function network of the lower dimensional feature,to characterize the hierarchical structure of brain networks and to measure the connectivity patterns of brain networks,to investigate the changes in the spatial location distribution of brain networks in patients with chronic neck pain and the brain functional abnormalities.The pattern of spatial compression and expansion corresponds to the separation and integration of functional networks in the brain.The results show that neck pain disrupts functional segregation and integration in the brain,altering sensorimotor and cognitive functions,in other words,neck pain affects functional networks at a large scale.