<PLOS One>Old papers

Search key words: brain connectivity stroke

These are papers published on PLOS One and its series journals.

Decreased Functional Connectivity of Homotopic Brain Regions in Chronic Stroke Patients: A Resting State fMRI Study

• The present study focuses on the functional connectivity (FC) of mirror regions of the whole brain to investigate the inter-hemispheric interaction using a new fMRI method named voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity (VMHC).
• Thirty left subcortical chronic stroke patients with pure motor deficits and 37 well-matched healthy controls (HCs)
• Relative to HCs, patients group displayed lower VMHC in the precentral gyrus, postcentral gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, calcarine gyrus, thalamus, cerebellum anterior lobe, and cerebellum posterior lobe (CPL).
• the VMHC of CPL was positively correlated with the Fugl–Meyer Score of hand (FMA-H), while a negative correlation between illness duration and the VMHC of this region was also detected.
• compared with HCs, the right CPL exhibited reduced FC with the left precentral gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, inferior parietal lobule, middle temporal gyrus, thalamus and hippocampus.
• Carter and colleagues reported that the disruption of homologous RSFC in the somatomotor network was significantly correlated with upper limb impairment.
• intra-hemispheric FC within the normal or damaged hemispheres was not correlated with performance in either network.

Contribution of the Resting-State Functional Connectivity of the Contralesional Primary Sensorimotor Cortex to Motor Recovery after Subcortical Stroke

• 13 patients who had experienced subcortical stroke underwent a series of resting-state fMRI and clinical assessments over a period of 1 year at 5 time points, i.e., within the first week, at 2 weeks, 1 month, 3 months, and 1 year after stroke onset.
• Compared with healthy controls, the rsFCs of the CL_PSMC(contralesional primary sensorimotor cortex) with the bilateral PSMC were initially decreased, then gradually increased, and finally restored to the normal level 1 year later.
• the dynamic change in the inter-hemispheric rsFC between the bilateral PSMC in these patients was positively correlated with the MI scores.
• This spontaneous motor recovery may be associated with structural and functional reorganization of the motor network
• The increased activation of the CL_PSMC has been considered to either facilitate [7], [10]–[14] or inhibit motor recovery [15]–[17].
• It should be noted that only patients with subcortical stroke were included in this study to improve the homogeneity of the patient population because cortical+subcortical and subcortical stroke patients have been shown to use completely different neural mechanisms for motor recovery
• These findings are consistent with previous reports on the non-significant contribution of intrahemispheric rsFC to motor recovery in stroke patients

* Disrupted Functional Brain Connectivity and Its Association to Structural Connectivity in Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer’s Disease

• A community structure would be considered as nonrandom community if its modularity fulfills: Q≥0.3
• The brain networks were separated into five, seven, and seven modules for AD, aMCI and NC groups, respectively
• According to their topological functions in the network, four possible roles of the regions were defined as connector hub (H), provincial hub (P), connector node (C), and provincial node (N). The information about the module compositions and regional node roles for each group was presented in Figure 5B. (比较正常组与病人组的 modular 的划分及Modularity 的大小)
• two parcellation of regions of interest (ROIs) (low: 90 ROIs, and high: 1024 ROIs，AAL) were employed to investigate the dependence of functional brain networks on different nodal scales.
• PCi measures the inter-module connectivity of a node i: