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Altered Effective Connectivity of Children and Young Adults With Unilateral Amblyopia: A Resting-State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study.

ABSTRACT: The altered functional connectivity (FC) in amblyopia has been investigated by many studies, but the specific causality of brain connectivity needs to be explored further to understand the brain activity of amblyopia. We investigated whether the effective connectivity (EC) of children and young adults with amblyopia was altered. The subjects included 16 children and young adults with left eye amblyopia and 17 healthy controls (HCs). The abnormalities between the left/right primary visual cortex (PVC) and the other brain regions were investigated in a voxel-wise manner using the Granger causality analysis (GCA). According to the EC results in the HCs and the distribution of visual pathways, 12 regions of interest (ROIs) were selected to construct an EC network. The alteration of the EC network of the children and young adults with amblyopia was analyzed. In the voxel-wise manner analysis, amblyopia showed significantly decreased EC between the left/right of the PVC and the left middle frontal gyrus/left inferior frontal gyrus compared with the HCs. In the EC network analysis, compared with the HCs, amblyopia showed significantly decreased EC from the left calcarine fissure, posterior cingulate gyrus, left lingual gyrus, right lingual gyrus, and right fusiform gyrus to the right calcarine fissure. Amblyopia also showed significantly decreased EC from the right inferior frontal gyrus and right lingual gyrus to the left superior temporal gyrus compared with the HCs in the EC network analysis. The results may indicate that amblyopia altered the visual feedforward and feedback pathway, and amblyopia may have a greater relevance with the feedback pathway than the feedforward pathway. Amblyopia may also correlate with the feedforward of the third visual pathway.

SUBMITTER: Dai P

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8290343 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:BackgroundChronic unilateral vestibulopathy (CUVP) is often accompanied by dizziness and postural instability, which restrict patients' daily activities. It is important to understand central compensation mechanisms underlying these symptoms in patients with CUVP by evaluating their brain functional status.PurposeTo analyze the changes in resting-state intranetwork and internetwork functional connectivity (FC) and explore the state of central vestibular compensation in patients with CUVP.Study typeRetrospective.PopulationEighteen patients with right-sided CUVP and 18 age- and sex-matched healthy controls.Field strength/sequenceA 3.0 T, three-dimensional magnetization-prepared rapid gradient-echo (MP-RAGE) and resting-state echo-planar imaging (EPI) functional MRI sequences.AssessmentFC alterations were explored using independent component analysis (ICA). Twelve independent components were identified via ICA. Dizziness Handicap Inventory (DHI) score for all patients was determined.Statistical testsTwo-sample t test, family-wise error (FWE) correction, Pearson correlation coefficient (r). A P value <0.05 was considered statistically significant.ResultsCompared with healthy controls, patients with CUVP showed significantly decreased FC in the right middle occipital gyrus within the lateral visual network, and significantly increased FC in the right supplementary motor area within the sensorimotor network. The FC was decreased between the medial visual and auditory networks, the right frontoparietal and posterior default networks, as well as the sensorimotor and auditory networks. There was a significant negative correlation between the FC changes in the visual, auditory networks and the DHI score in patients with CUVP (r = -0.583).Data conclusionCompared to healthy controls, the FC was significantly decreased in the right visual cortex and significantly enhanced in the right sensorimotor network in patients with CUVP. Patients with CUVP showed decreased FC between multiple whole-brain networks, suggesting that abnormal integration of multisensory information may be involved in the occurrence of chronic dizziness and instability in patients with CUVP.Level of evidence4 TECHNICAL EFFICACY: Stage 2.

Project description:The human brain at rest exhibits intrinsic dynamics transitioning among the multiple metastable states of the inter-regional functional connectivity. Accordingly, the demand for exploring the state-specific functional connectivity increases for a deeper understanding of mental diseases. Functional connectivity, however, lacks information about the directed causal influences among the brain regions, called effective connectivity. This study presents the dynamic causal modeling (DCM) framework to explore the state-dependent effective connectivity using spectral DCM for the resting-state functional MRI (rsfMRI). We established the sequence of brain states using the hidden Markov model with the multivariate autoregressive coefficients of rsfMRI, summarizing the functional connectivity. We decomposed the state-dependent effective connectivity using a parametric empirical Bayes scheme that models the effective connectivity of consecutive windows with the time course of the discrete states as regressors. We showed the plausibility of the state-dependent effective connectivity analysis in a simulation setting. To test the clinical applicability, we applied the proposed method to characterize the state- and subtype-dependent effective connectivity of the default mode network in children with combined-type attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD-C) compared with age-matched, typically developed children (TDC). All 88 children were subtyped according to the occupation times (i.e., dwell times) of the three dominant functional connectivity states, independently of clinical diagnosis. The state-dependent effective connectivity differences between ADHD-C and TDC according to the subtypes and those between the subtypes of ADHD-C were expressed mainly in self-inhibition, magnifying the importance of excitation inhibition balance in the subtyping. These findings provide a clear motivation for decomposing the state-dependent dynamic effective connectivity and state-dependent analysis of the directed coupling in exploring mental diseases.

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Altered Effective Connectivity of Children and Young Adults With Unilateral Amblyopia: A Resting-State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study.

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