Biomedical Imaging / Medical Imaging
Farzaneh Keyvanfard; Alireza Rahiminasab; Abbas Nasiraei Moghaddam
Volume 15, Issue 3 , December 2021, , Pages 211-220
Abstract
In brain disorders, both the brain structural and functional connectivity are altered and cause different behavioral symptoms. Recognizing these variations can help us to diagnose, treat, and control its progression. Schizophrenia is one of these mental disorders that widely affects the brain structure ...
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In brain disorders, both the brain structural and functional connectivity are altered and cause different behavioral symptoms. Recognizing these variations can help us to diagnose, treat, and control its progression. Schizophrenia is one of these mental disorders that widely affects the brain structure and function. Investigation of brain variations in this disease has commonly been based on voxel-wise analysis or region-based studies. The aim of this study is to evaluate brain structure and function alterations in schizophrenia patients comparing to healthy control from the brain connectivity perspective. For this purpose, using the statistical test method, a comparison was made between all the structural and functional connections in the brain of 92 healthy individuals and 37 schizophrenia patients obtained from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) respectively. The findings of this study indicate that the number of altered edges in the brain functional network of patients is about 4 times more than the number of varied structural connections, which indicates the high impact of this disorder on brain function. Also, examination of the number of altered edges connected to each node, the affected areas in this disease were identified and it was shown that the schizophrenia patients’ brain has changed in parts of the brain subnetworks related to the default mode network (DMN), attention, somatomotor and vision networks. It was also shown that the altered brain structural connections of patients are involved in the areas of the superior frontal gyrus, temporal gyrus and part of the occipital cortex which are mostly shown relative increasing of the structural connectivity weights. The results of this study indicate the widespread effect of this disorder on the brain and suggest that the occurrence of some abnormal behaviors in schizophrenia patients may be due to some increased structural connectivity weights.
Bioelectrics
Farzaneh Keyvanfard; Abbas Nasiraei Moghaddam
Volume 13, Issue 2 , August 2019, , Pages 147-158
Abstract
Brain as the most complex organ in the human body has been investigated from various aspects. The greatest origin of this complexity is due to the fact that, despite the fixed architecture of brain structure (physical connections), the functional connectivity is in a constantly changing state, resulting ...
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Brain as the most complex organ in the human body has been investigated from various aspects. The greatest origin of this complexity is due to the fact that, despite the fixed architecture of brain structure (physical connections), the functional connectivity is in a constantly changing state, resulting to different behaviors. In many mental diseases, both brain structural and functional connectivities and their relationship are changed and cause different symptoms. Investigation of brain connectivity variations in the disease may help to better understanding of the relationship between brain structure and function. One of the most severe and debilitating brain disorders is Schizophrenia in which both brain structure and function are involved. Among all available methods, multimodal analysis of data has been recently gained great interest to provide the capability of extracting association between separate neuroimaging data. However, due to their voxel based viewpoint, relationship between brain connectivities cannot be inferred. In this study, the joint independent component analysis (jICA) has been proposed to investigate the relationship between brain functional and structural connectivity. We applied the suggested approach to combine functional and structural connectivity, in order to assess abnormalities underlying schizophrenic patients relative to healthy people. The findings suggest that the correspondence between brain function and structure is not necessarily one-to-one. The results also indicated that variations in several structural fibers, such as superior longitudinal fasciculus and inferior longitudinal fasciculus, are associated with functional changes in the temporal and frontal lobes. Besides, analyzing the nodal strength and shortest path length in the obtained subnetworks demonstrates that the functional subnetworks efficiency in parallel information transfer in schizophrenic patients is reduced. Overall, the outcomes point out the capability of the proposed method to better understanding of brain functional and structural connectivity association and its variations in brain disorders.
