scholarly journals Damage to the structural connectome reflected in resting-state fMRI functional connectivity

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 1197-1218
Author(s):  
Anirudh Wodeyar ◽  
Jessica M. Cassidy ◽  
Steven C. Cramer ◽  
Ramesh Srinivasan

The relationship between structural and functional connectivity has been mostly examined in intact brains. Fewer studies have examined how differences in structure as a result of injury alters function. In this study we analyzed the relationship of structure to function across patients with stroke among whom infarcts caused heterogenous structural damage. We estimated relationships between distinct brain regions of interest (ROIs) from functional MRI in two pipelines. In one analysis pipeline, we measured functional connectivity by using correlation and partial correlation between 114 cortical ROIs. We found fMRI-BOLD partial correlation was altered at more edges as a function of the structural connectome (SC) damage, relative to the correlation. In a second analysis pipeline, we limited our analysis to fMRI correlations between pairs of voxels for which we possess SC information. We found that voxel-level functional connectivity showed the effect of structural damage that we could not see when examining correlations between ROIs. Further, the effects of structural damage on functional connectivity are consistent with a model of functional connectivity, diffusion, which expects functional connectivity to result from activity spreading over multiple edge anatomical paths.

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Kohut ◽  
Dionyssios Mintzopoulos ◽  
Brian D. Kangas ◽  
Hannah Shields ◽  
Kelly Brown ◽  
...  

AbstractLong-term cocaine use is associated with a variety of neural and behavioral deficits that impact daily function. This study was conducted to examine the effects of chronic cocaine self-administration on resting-state functional connectivity of the dorsal anterior cingulate (dACC) and putamen—two brain regions involved in cognitive function and motoric behavior—identified in a whole brain analysis. Six adult male squirrel monkeys self-administered cocaine (0.32 mg/kg/inj) over 140 sessions. Six additional monkeys that had not received any drug treatment for ~1.5 years served as drug-free controls. Resting-state fMRI imaging sessions at 9.4 Tesla were conducted under isoflurane anesthesia. Functional connectivity maps were derived using seed regions placed in the left dACC or putamen. Results show that cocaine maintained robust self-administration with an average total intake of 367 mg/kg (range: 299–424 mg/kg). In the cocaine group, functional connectivity between the dACC seed and regions primarily involved in motoric behavior was weaker, whereas connectivity between the dACC seed and areas implicated in reward and cognitive processing was stronger. In the putamen seed, weaker widespread connectivity was found between the putamen and other motor regions as well as with prefrontal areas that regulate higher-order executive function; stronger connectivity was found with reward-related regions. dACC connectivity was associated with total cocaine intake. These data indicate that functional connectivity between regions involved in motor, reward, and cognitive processing differed between subjects with recent histories of cocaine self-administration and controls; in dACC, connectivity appears to be related to cumulative cocaine dosage during chronic exposure.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu-Chen Chen ◽  
Jian Zhang ◽  
Xiao-Wei Li ◽  
Wenqing Xia ◽  
Xu Feng ◽  
...  

Objective. Subjective tinnitus is hypothesized to arise from aberrant neural activity; however, its neural bases are poorly understood. To identify aberrant neural networks involved in chronic tinnitus, we compared the resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) patterns of tinnitus patients and healthy controls.Materials and Methods. Resting-state fMRI measurements were obtained from a group of chronic tinnitus patients (n=29) with normal hearing and well-matched healthy controls (n=30). Regional homogeneity (ReHo) analysis and functional connectivity analysis were used to identify abnormal brain activity; these abnormalities were compared to tinnitus distress.Results. Relative to healthy controls, tinnitus patients had significant greater ReHo values in several brain regions including the bilateral anterior insula (AI), left inferior frontal gyrus, and right supramarginal gyrus. Furthermore, the left AI showed enhanced functional connectivity with the left middle frontal gyrus (MFG), while the right AI had enhanced functional connectivity with the right MFG; these measures were positively correlated with Tinnitus Handicap Questionnaires (r=0.459,P=0.012andr=0.479,P=0.009, resp.).Conclusions. Chronic tinnitus patients showed abnormal intra- and interregional synchronization in several resting-state cerebral networks; these abnormalities were correlated with clinical tinnitus distress. These results suggest that tinnitus distress is exacerbated by attention networks that focus on internally generated phantom sounds.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arun S. Mahadevan ◽  
Ursula A. Tooley ◽  
Maxwell A. Bertolero ◽  
Allyson P. Mackey ◽  
Danielle S. Bassett

AbstractFunctional connectivity (FC) networks are typically inferred from resting-state fMRI data using the Pearson correlation between BOLD time series from pairs of brain regions. However, alternative methods of estimating functional connectivity have not been systematically tested for their sensitivity or robustness to head motion artifact. Here, we evaluate the sensitivity of six different functional connectivity measures to motion artifact using resting-state data from the Human Connectome Project. We report that FC estimated using full correlation has a relatively high residual distance-dependent relationship with motion compared to partial correlation, coherence and information theory-based measures, even after implementing rigorous methods for motion artifact mitigation. This disadvantage of full correlation, however, may be offset by higher test-retest reliability and system identifiability. FC estimated by partial correlation offers the best of both worlds, with low sensitivity to motion artifact and intermediate system identifiability, with the caveat of low test-retest reliability. We highlight spatial differences in the sub-networks affected by motion with different FC metrics. Further, we report that intra-network edges in the default mode and retrosplenial temporal sub-networks are highly correlated with motion in all FC methods. Our findings indicate that the method of estimating functional connectivity is an important consideration in resting-state fMRI studies and must be chosen carefully based on the parameters of the study.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olaf Sporns ◽  
Joshua Faskowitz ◽  
Andreia Sofia Teixera ◽  
Richard F. Betzel

AbstractFunctional connectivity (FC) describes the statistical dependence between brain regions in resting-state fMRI studies and is usually estimated as the Pearson correlation of time courses. Clustering reveals densely coupled sets of regions constituting a set of resting-state networks or functional systems. These systems manifest most clearly when FC is sampled over longer epochs lasting many minutes but appear to fluctuate on shorter time scales. Here, we propose a new approach to track these temporal fluctuations. Un-wrapping FC signal correlations yields pairwise co-fluctuation time series, one for each node pair/edge, and reveals fine-scale dynamics across the network. Co-fluctuations partition the network, at each time step, into exactly two communities. Sampled over time, the overlay of these bipartitions, a binary decomposition of the original time series, very closely approximates functional connectivity. Bipartitions exhibit characteristic spatiotemporal patterns that are reproducible across participants and imaging sessions and disclose fine-scale profiles of the time-varying levels of expression of functional systems. Our findings document that functional systems appear transiently and intermittently, and that FC results from the overlay of many variable instances of system expression. Potential applications of this decomposition of functional connectivity into a set of binary patterns are discussed.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luoyao Pang ◽  
Huidi Li ◽  
Quanying Liu ◽  
Yue-jia Luo ◽  
Dean Mobbs ◽  
...  

Motivated dishonesty is a typical social behavior varying from person to person. Resting-state fMRI (rsfMRI) is capable of identifying unique patterns from functional connectivity (FC) between brain networks. To identify the relevant neural patterns and build an interpretable model to predict dishonesty, we scanned 8-min rsfMRI before an information-passing task. In the task, we employed monetary rewards to induce dishonesty. We applied both connectome-based predictive modeling (CPM) and region-of-interest (ROI) analysis to examine the association between FC and dishonesty. CPM indicated that the stronger FC between fronto-parietal and default mode networks can predict a higher dishonesty rate. The ROIs were set in the regions involving four cognitive processes (self-reference, cognitive control, reward valuation, and moral regulation). The ROI analyses showed that a stronger FC between these regions and the prefrontal cortex can predict a higher dishonesty rate. Our study offers an integrated model to predict dishonesty with rsfMRI, and the results suggest that the frequent motivated dishonest behavior may require a higher engagement of social brain regions.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Schwab ◽  
Ruth Harbord ◽  
Valerio Zerbi ◽  
Lloyd Elliott ◽  
Soroosh Afyouni ◽  
...  

AbstractThere are a growing number of neuroimaging methods that model spatio-temporal patterns of brain activity to allow more meaningful characterizations of brain networks. This paper proposes dynamic graphical models (DGMs) for dynamic, directed functional connectivity. DGMs are a multivariate graphical model with time-varying coefficients that describe instantaneous directed relationships between nodes. A further benefit of DGMs is that networks may contain loops and that large networks can be estimated. We use network simulations, human resting-state fMRI (N = 500) to investigate the validity and reliability of the estimated networks. We simulate systematic lags of the hemodynamic response at different brain regions to investigate how these lags potentially bias directionality estimates. In the presence of such lag confounds (0.4–0.8 seconds offset between connected nodes), our method has a sensitivity of 72%–77% to detect the true direction. Stronger lag confounds have reduced sensitivity, but do not increase false positives (i.e., directionality estimates of the opposite direction). In human resting-state fMRI, we find the DMN has consistent influence on the cerebellar, the limbic and the auditory/temporal network, as well a consistent reciprocal relationship between the visual medial and visual lateral network. Finally, we apply the method in a small mouse fMRI sample and discover a highly plausible relationship between areas in the hippocampus feeding into the cingulate cortex. We provide a computationally efficient implementation of DGM as a free software package for R.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alican Nalci ◽  
Bhaskar D. Rao ◽  
Thomas T. Liu

AbstractIn resting-state fMRI, dynamic functional connectivity (DFC) measures are used to characterize temporal changes in the brain’s intrinsic functional connectivity. A widely used approach for DFC estimation is the computation of the sliding window correlation between blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signals from different brain regions. Although the source of temporal fluctuations in DFC estimates remains largely unknown, there is growing evidence that they may reflect dynamic shifts between functional brain networks. At the same time, recent findings suggest that DFC estimates might be prone to the influence of nuisance factors such as the physiological modulation of the BOLD signal. Therefore, nuisance regression is used in many DFC studies to regress out the effects of nuisance terms prior to the computation of DFC estimates. In this work we examined the relationship between DFC estimates and nuisance factors. We found that DFC estimates were significantly correlated with temporal fluctuations in the magnitude (norm) of various nuisance regressors, with significant correlations observed in the majority (76%) of the cases examined. Significant correlations between the DFC estimates and nuisance regressor norms were found even when the underlying correlations between the nuisance and fMRI time courses were relatively small. We then show that nuisance regression does not eliminate the relationship between DFC estimates and nuisance norms, with significant correlations observed in the majority (71%) of the cases examined after nuisance regression. We present theoretical bounds on the difference between DFC estimates obtained before and after nuisance regression and relate these bounds to limitations in the efficacy of nuisance regression with regards to DFC estimates.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dongsheng Zhang ◽  
Jie Gao ◽  
Xuejiao Yan ◽  
Min Tang ◽  
Xia Zhe ◽  
...  

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