Regional and network properties of white matter function in Parkinson's disease

作者：Gong‐Jun Ji, Cuiping Ren, Ying Li, Jinmei Sun, Tingting Liu, Yaxiang Gao, Dongzhang Xue, Longshan Shen, Wen Cheng, Chunyan Zhu, Yanghua Tian, Panpan Hu, Xianwen Chen, Kai Wang · 发表于：Human Brain Mapping · 年份：2018 · DOI：10.1002/hbm.24444 · 被引用次数：146 · 研究领域：Advanced Neuroimaging Techniques and Applications、Parkinson's Disease Mechanisms and Treatments、Advanced MRI Techniques and Applications

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder with dysfunction in cortices as well as white matter (WM) tracts. While the changes to WM structure have been extensively investigated in PD, the nature of the functional changes to WM remains unknown. In this study, the regional activity and functional connectivity of WM were compared between PD patients (n = 57) and matched healthy controls (n = 52), based on multimodel magnetic resonance imaging data sets. By tract-based spatial statistical analyses of regional activity, patients showed decreased structural-functional coupling in the left corticospinal tract compared to controls. This tract also displayed abnormally increased functional connectivity within the left post-central gyrus and left putamen in PD patients. At the network level, the WM functional network showed small-worldness in both controls and PD patients, yet it was abnormally increased in the latter group. Based on the features of the WM functional connectome, previously un-evaluated individuals could be classified with fair accuracy (73%) and area under the curve of the receiver operating characteristics (75%). These neuroimaging findings provide direct evidence for WM functional changes in PD, which is crucial to understand the functional role of fiber tracts in the pathology of neural circuits.