Evaluating functional connectivity of executive control network and frontoparietal network in Alzheimer's disease
Evaluating functional connectivity of executive control network and frontoparietal network in Alzheimer's disease
复制标题
评估阿尔茨海默病执行控制网络和额顶叶网络的功能连接
DOI：
10.1016/j.brainres.2017.10.025
复制
发表时间：
2017
期刊：
影响因子：
2.9
通讯作者：
Jianfeng Lu
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Qinghua Zhao;Hong Lu;Hichem Metmer;Will X.Y. Li（李翔宇）;Jianfeng Lu
研究早期阿尔茨海默病（AD）更强调敏感和特异的生物标志物，这可以帮助临床医生监测AD的进展和治疗。在这些生物标志物中，默认模式网络（DMN）功能连接作为诊断早期阿尔茨海默病的潜在非侵入性生物标志物越来越受到关注。然而，除了DMN的功能连接发生变化外，其他功能网络尚未得到系统的研究。最近的脑成像研究报告称，许多可重复且强大的功能网络分布在遥远的神经解剖区域。受这些工作的启发，在本文中，我们将稀疏表示应用于全脑信号，以识别这些可重复的网络，并检测阿尔茨海默病部分受影响的大脑区域，然后采用稀疏逆协方差估计（SICE）方法来研究内在连接网络的功能连接变化。我们的实验结果表明，除了DMN之外，AD还受到其他大规模功能性脑网络和区域的影响，例如执行控制网络（ECN）、额顶叶网络（FPN），其中ECN的额上回（SFGmed）和额中回（MFG）以及FPN的部分旁中央小叶（PCL）以及FPN的上顶叶回（SPG）区域具有增强的功能连接显示出连接性下降。结果可能表明 AD 与更大规模的功能网络相关，并导致许多不同大脑区域的功能连接变化。它还证明这些网络有时可能协同工作来执行任务，而这种功能连接的改变可能为早期 AD 诊断提供有用的基线。
Investigating the early Alzheimer’s disease (AD) more emphasizes sensitive and specific biomarkers, which can help the clinicians to monitor the progression and treatments of AD. Among these biomarkers, default mode network (DMN) functional connectivity is gaining more attention as a potential noninvasive biomarker to diagnose incipient Alzheimer's disease. However, besides changed functional connectivity of DMN, other functional networks haven’t yet been examined systematically. Recent brain imaging studies reported that a number of reproducible and robust functional networks, which were distributed in distant neuroanatomic areas. Inspired by these works, in this paper, we apply sparse representation to the whole brain signals to identify these reproducible networks and detect partly affected brain regions of Alzheimer’s disease, then adopt sparse inverse covariance estimation (SICE) approach to investigate the changed functional connectivity of intrinsic connectivity networks. Our experimental results show that besides DMN, AD is also affected by others large scale functional brain networks and regions, e.g., executive control network (ECN), frontoparietal network (FPN), where in the superior frontal gyrus (SFGmed) and middle frontal gyrus (MFG) of ECN and in the part paracentral Lobule (PCL) of FPN have an increased functional connectivity, as well as in the Superior Parietal Gyrus (SPG) regions of FPN has shown decreased connectivity. The results may suggest AD is associated with larger scale functional networks and causes the functional connectivity change of many different brain regions. It also proves that these networks may sometimes work together to perform tasks, and such changed functional connectivity may provide a useful baseline for early AD diagnosis.