Whether Visual-Related Structural and Functional Changes Occur in Brain of Patients with Acute Incomplete Cervical Cord Injury: A Multimodal Based MRI Study

Publication date: Available online 14 October 2018Source: NeuroscienceAuthor(s): Qian Chen, Weimin Zheng, Xin Chen, Xuejing Li, Ling Wang, Wen Qin, Kuncheng Li, Nan ChenAbstractVisual-related cortex plays an important role in the process of movement. It is great of importance to clarify whether traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI), which is a typical disease resulted in sensorimotor dysfunction, leads to the alteration of visual-related brain structure and function area. To address this issue, multimodality MRI was applied on eleven patients with acute incomplete cervical cord injury (ICCI) and eleven healthy controls (HCs) to explore possible structural and functional changes of the brain. Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) analysis was performed to investigate the changes in brain structure of ICCI patients. The fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (fALFF) was used to characterize changes in regional neural activities, and independent component analysis (ICA) was carried out to explore alterations in the resting-state networks (RSNs) after ICCI. We also investigated correlations among brain imaging metrics and between the metrics and clinical variables. Compared with HCs, ICCI patients exhibited significant gray matter atrophy in the left hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus, right superior frontal gyrus (SFG), and middle frontal gyrus (MFG) and also decrease of fALFF in the left orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Moreover, ICCI patients exhibited decreased intra-network f...
Source: Neuroscience - Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research