Dr. SUN Yu’s Laboratory published a research article entitled “Dynamic reorganization of functional connectivity reveals abnormal temporal efficiency in schizophrenia” in Schizophrenia Bulletin. The article was accepted on 17th May, 2018. Dr. SUN is the first and corresponding author of the study.
Schizophrenia is a complex neuropsychiatric disorder with a myriad of clinical manifestations. Whilst the precise neural substrates underpinning the heterogeneous clinical manifestations are far from understood, it is increasingly being conceptualized as a disorder that resulted from abnormal interactions between brain regions. Nonetheless, the implicit assumption of stationary functional connectivity (FC) adopted in most previous resting-state fMRI studies raises an open question of schizophrenia-related aberrations in dynamic properties of resting-state FC. Here, we introduce an empirical method to examine the dynamic functional dysconnectivity in patients with schizophrenia. Through the newly introduced temporal efficiency approach and temporal random network models, we examined, for the first time, the 3-D spatiotemporal architecture of the temporal brain network. We found that although prominent temporal small-world properties were revealed in both groups, temporal brain networks of patients with schizophrenia in both datasets showed a significantly higher temporal global efficiency. Specifically, we found localized changes of temporal nodal properties in the left frontal, right media parietal, and subcortical areas that were associated with clinical features of schizophrenia. Our findings demonstrate that altered dynamic FC may underlie abnormal brain function and clinical symptoms observed in schizophrenia. Moreover, we provide new evidence to extend the dysconnectivity hypothesis in schizophrenia from static to dynamic brain network and highlight the potential of aberrant brain dynamic FC in unravelling the pathophysiologic mechanisms of the disease.
Reference：
Y. SUN, S. L. Collinson, J. Suckling, K. Sim, (2018). Dynamic reorganization of functional connectivity reveals abnormal temporal efficiency in schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Bulletin (Epub ahead of print, DOI: 10.1093/schbul/sby077)
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