Investigating resting-state functional connectivity in the cervical spinal cord at 3T.
Investigating resting-state functional connectivity in the cervical spinal cord at 3T.
复制标题
DOI：
10.1016/j.neuroimage.2016.12.072
复制
发表时间：
2017-02-15
期刊：
影响因子：
5.7
通讯作者：
Tracey I
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Eippert F;Kong Y;Winkler AM;Andersson JL;Finsterbusch J;Büchel C;Brooks JCW;Tracey I
血氧水平依赖（BOLD）信号的自发波动的研究最近已从大脑扩展到脊髓。两个超高场功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）的研究在人类提供了证据，可再现的静息状态之间的连接背角以及腹角之间，和非人类灵长类动物的研究表明，这些静息状态信号的影响脊髓损伤。由于这些研究是使用基于感兴趣区（ROI）的分析在超高场强下进行的，因此我们研究了在临床上更普遍的场强3 T下是否也可以观察到此类静息状态信号。在对20名健康人类参与者进行颈脊髓静息状态fMRI采集的样本进行重新分析时，我们能够观察到显著的背角连接和腹角连接，但背角和腹角之间的连接没有一致的影响，从而复制了人类7 T结果。这些效应不仅在沿着获得的脊髓长度取平均值时可以观察到，而且在我们单独检查每个获得的脊髓节段时也可以观察到，这些节段显示出类似的连接模式。最后，我们通过改变ROI创建、时间滤波、滋扰回归和连接性度量的类型，研究了这些静息状态信号对分析管道中变化的鲁棒性。我们观察到，除了带通滤波的影响，腹角连接表现出良好的鲁棒性，而背角连接表现出中等的鲁棒性。总之，我们的研究结果提供的证据表明，脊髓静息状态连接是一个强大的和空间一致的现象，可能是一个有价值的工具，用于研究病理学的影响，疾病进展，和治疗反应的神经系统疾病与脊髓组件，如脊髓损伤。
The study of spontaneous fluctuations in the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal has recently been extended from the brain to the spinal cord. Two ultra-high field functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies in humans have provided evidence for reproducible resting-state connectivity between the dorsal horns as well as between the ventral horns, and a study in non-human primates has shown that these resting-state signals are impacted by spinal cord injury. As these studies were carried out at ultra-high field strengths using region-of-interest (ROI) based analyses, we investigated whether such resting-state signals could also be observed at the clinically more prevalent field strength of 3 T. In a reanalysis of a sample of 20 healthy human participants who underwent a resting-state fMRI acquisition of the cervical spinal cord, we were able to observe significant dorsal horn connectivity as well as ventral horn connectivity, but no consistent effects for connectivity between dorsal and ventral horns, thus replicating the human 7 T results. These effects were not only observable when averaging along the acquired length of the spinal cord, but also when we examined each of the acquired spinal segments separately, which showed similar patterns of connectivity. Finally, we investigated the robustness of these resting-state signals against variations in the analysis pipeline by varying the type of ROI creation, temporal filtering, nuisance regression and connectivity metric. We observed that – apart from the effects of band-pass filtering – ventral horn connectivity showed excellent robustness, whereas dorsal horn connectivity showed moderate robustness. Together, our results provide evidence that spinal cord resting-state connectivity is a robust and spatially consistent phenomenon that could be a valuable tool for investigating the effects of pathology, disease progression, and treatment response in neurological conditions with a spinal component, such as spinal cord injury.